There's quite a difference between a particular test having little power, and all model trends being accepted. Thus comparing short trends has very little power to distinguish between alternate expectations. The mean of all the 8 year trends is close to the long term trend (0.19✬/decade), but the standard deviation is almost as large (0.17✬/decade), implying that a trend would have to be either >0.5✬/decade or much more negative (< -0.2✬/decade) for it to obviously fall outside the distribution. They say: What it shows is exactly what anyone should expect: the trends over such short periods are variable sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes negative - depending on which year you start with. But realclimate does not say that all possible trends are consistent with the climate models. I do believe that 8 years is too short to be talking about climate as a general matter, but if global mean temperature next year jumped or fell by 2 C without major changes (solar or volcanic or X), I'd say that the models were missing something important (hence 'falsified'). I followed your link to his article instead, and in the second paragraph he says: "And we have learned from Real Climate that all possible temperature trends of 8 years in length are consistent with climate models. Pielke Jr.'s mind reading skills really aren't about science, so I skip that. It's also much more likely to be what Pauli had in mind given that Popper didn't start writing on Falsification until after Pauli made the statement. The 2 + 2 = kumquat, or iguana + 2 = banana sorts of formulations are what I take as central to 'not even wrong'. I happen to disagree with the wikipedia about that interpretation of 'not even wrong'. Nothing nefarious involved, so you can relax. ex: "Meteorologists don't allow for urban heat island effect, therefore there's been no real warming the last 50 years." This shows up often in blog comments about climate where a question like "Has the temperature risen in the past 100 years?" is met with responses like "It was warmer 70 million years ago", "You're just trying to take away my SUV", "It's all natural." Not even wrong - the response has no connection to the question.ĭifferent version is to start with a falsehood and then draw whatever conclusion you'd like. One form of 'not even wrong' is that the answer has nothing to do with the question. If I said 2+2 = kumquat, we're over to not even wrong. I'm not going to dwell on the document itself, but it seems worthwhile to look some more at the 'not even wrong' flags.īut first, the term itself. I was reminded of this by a document that wanted to toss aside most of the last 100+ years of science on climate. "Not even wrong" is a good summary of a number of psuedoscientific things. Wolfgang Pauli is said to have responded That's not right.
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