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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

We have more than "a few" datapoints at this time. Also, I don't think determinism is relevant to climate change. I.e. whether reality is deterministic is not what's at issue, it's whether the earth is heating up and whether human activity is a primary causal factor (yes, in both cases). There's also no conflict between determinism and systems too large to model precisely -- stochastic systems, in other words.

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"We have more than "a few" datapoints at this time"

We do? Have we determined the duration where we can declare the climate process stationary (in a stochastic sense, of course)?

Yes. We're talking about studies into volcanic activity's effect on historic solar irradiance that cross validate tree ring growth rate models of ancient fossilized trees both in turn validated by extensive data on global geological strata that the global resource extraction industry relies on to efficiently prospect for fossil fuels and minerals. We've talking about large swings in CO2/O2 and temperature in our geological and fossil record that changed the face of the planet many times over, which is why we know this current swing is far out of the ordinary. The reason we are so certain is that hundreds of years of solar irradiance data of increasing precision and a vast web of 2nd order data providing historical estimates demonstrate that the Earth's temperature and the sun's energy output have been decoupling (aka becoming less correlated) at an accelerating rate, starting with the industrial revolution. Instead the variance has become increasingly correlated with our environmental conditions, aka the presence of green house gasses and albedo.

I'm glad you've figured out the fault in the evidence and reasoning behind 1000s of scientists working on various aspects of the earth's climate. I can't wait for your publication!

What on earth does that mean?

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

I'm a big fan of the Socratic approach but when people use it as a cudgel they're usually less interested in the answer than in positioning themselves as the questioning authority for the emotional impact upon an audience. Watch a B movie with the sound off or a foreign language film with no subtitles; you may not be able to follow the plot that well but you can easily tell who is supposed to be winning or losing each scene by observing the characters' demeanor. Same dynamic often obtains in internet arguments.

I don't think anyone believes climate is a stationary stochastic process.

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