Socialized Health Care in the USA

[Jester]

That being said, the actual data from the past five decades leave little doubt that global warming is a very real and present phenomenon. Predicting may be difficult, postdicting is much easier. So, although the prognosis may be unclear, the diagnosis is beyond doubt. And, to further mix metaphors, we don't know if the climatic Russian roulette we're playing is with all the chambers loaded or all empty or something in between.

In the world of computer modelling, I can only imagine that the last two decades loom rather large, given what we can do now that we couldn't in 1989. I don't think there is anything like a 'grand climate change model' that you can simply plug current data into, and reveal the past and future with accuracy. I think the general approach has been to break the problem into chunks and model each individually with more reliability, then put the pieces together to obtain a more realistic whole. Perhaps there are papers available which offer more helpful details for someone like yourself who might actually understand them. Realclimate.com seems to offer quite a lot for the interested specialist, although I'm not sure source code is one of those things.

My understanding is also that nobody has successfully constructed a plausible competing theory. Attributing past climate change without including a significant role for carbon dioxide forcing is (apparently) not feasible with current data and theory. Once you've given CO2 a major role when attributing past warming, it's pretty tough to come up with any prediction except that adding lots more to the atmosphere will lead to warming.

-Jester