No controversy with climate change

Regarding the letter to the CDT by Paul Warme (CDT, 7/6) on the subject of global climate, I continue to be mystified that so many people who do not understand the climate science still feel compelled to denigrate it. I have not read the Robinson book to which he refers (I knew G. D. Robinson), but the fact that data tends to be corrupted by errors and uncertainties, and that models have faults is no surprise to any of us or to our students in atmospheric science.

The hard part of the research begins when imperfect and noisy data are subjected to very sophisticated statistical treatment in order to extract useful information. Various climate groups around the world use different techniques to do this, but the results are all very similar. Models are no mystery either. Equations governing the motion of air and water and those governing radiative transfer have been known, respectively since the 17th and 19th centuries.

Most of our graduate students could write down many of these equations by heart. Again, different research groups tweak these well-known equations differently but they all produce about the same results. In fact, any model that did not show a very profound warming with an indisputable increase of 35 percent in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (such has occurred since the beginning of the 20th century) would, indeed, be wrong. For almost all atmospheric scientists there is no controversy.

This story was originally published July 9, 2017 at 9:40 PM with the headline "No controversy with climate change."