Just the Facts, Sir

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones is warning his readers that climate change is worse than they think. It seems a buddy of his developed a model that shows a doubling of CO2 will lead to twice as much warming as earlier models have predicted. Drum offers this caveat (emphasis added):

This is just one model. There are lots of parameters to fit, there are only two glacial intervals to test, and the error bars are fairly large. In other words, it might be wrong. But it's one more data point in an increasing series of data points suggesting that climate change is worse than we thought—though "worse" is something of an understatement.

Models are NOT data points. Data points are facts. An example of a fact in climate science would be a temperature reading or something else a person or scientific instrument has observed and recorded. Models are NOT facts. Models are predictions based on the assumptions of the person who designed the model. A model examines past events, and uses that information and tries to anticipate future scenarios. And, they are very poor at it. The reason they are poor is because thousands of variables affect the climate, not all of which are well understood. It's difficult to write a computer model accounting for thousands of variables that are not well understood.

Climate science is one of the weaker sciences because there isn't much quality data from the past, and experimentation is nearly impossible. Drum's solution is to call the model predictions "data." Models are not facts, and when you don't have facts, you shouldn't make them up. But, climate science is so dependent on models, I guess calling them facts was inevitable.

One last note: in 2007 Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his work on climate change. However, he wasn't alone. The scientists who run the IPCC (the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) also won the award. Of course, they didn't win it in any of the sciences. Along worth Gore, they received the Nobel Prize for Peace. They weren't eligible for any of the science awards, because the Nobel Committee won't give the prize for work dependent on computer models.  

Models are the weakest form of science, and even Oslo knows it.