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Comment by hackworth | Hacker News Reader

i prefer to use "global climate change" instead of "global warming" to avoid confusing people with only a cursory understanding of how climate works.

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That may be why you use it, but in general that phrase is used because it's more general, so it's easier to attribute any sort of anomalous climate phenomena to human causes and thus drive public policy.

No one has more than a cursory understanding of how climate works. That's why there was no science called 'Climatology', until people realized it was a vehicle for doing 'Post Normal' Science. http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-a...

Or we're not retarded, but still enjoy making a mockery of the concept of (A)GW often in the name of snark alone. "skepticism" optional even if implied by the mockery. Also, it was yet another wonderful snowy, cold day for a bike commute. This is the only time of year people give me a whole lane to myself.

People who are inclined to be confused will be confused regardless. The rest of us already understand this point.

People tend to confuse climate and weather, i.e., it's cold out today so there isn't global warming and "we can't predict the weather a week in advance, how can we predict climate years in advance??!11!".

wrt to you last "confused person" question. Has there been any study of how accurately climate models can predict climate (e.g. average global temperature) even five years out from a given year?

Just to clarify...

If I gave a climate model all the temp data from 1888-1990 and then said ok, what's the AGT in 1995? Would it be correct? I guess the difficult part would be finding a model that hasn't already been modified so it would be correct for 1995. You'd have to use the 1990 version of the modeling software.

I thought that the scientific community had by and large backed off from the earth cooking to the more easily provable position of CO2 levels rising/oceans acidifying?

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