Roy Spencer was allowed to give an interesting presentation at the AGU meeting in San Franscisco. I liked this comment:

I can’t help feeling that you might as well have stood before a flock of Archbishops, who were discussing the 7 days of creation, stating that there is evidence that the earth is actually several billion years old – and giving evidence to support your idea. The religious elite smile and nod, and say encouraging words.. “interesting way of seeing things, young man…” before moving on to discuss whether The Almighty drank coffee or iced tea during work breaks.

But this is an interesting point as well:

There seems to be great reluctance to consider the possibility that these computerized prophets of doom, which have required so many scientists and so much money and so many years to develop, could be wrong. I come along with an extremely simple climate model that explains the behavior of the satellite data in details that are beyond even what has been done with the complex climate models…and then the more complex models are STILL believed because…well…they’re more complex.

Besides, since my simple model would predict very little manmade global warming, it must be wrong. After all, we know that manmade global warming is a huge problem. All of the experts agree on that. Just ask Al Gore and the mainstream news media.

Let us stipulate that a valid model of climate prediction is going to be complex, or at least, the more complexity, the more likely it is that it is taking the necessary factors into account. That does not, in itself, render complexity a virtue, and it’s quite possible that a simple model will do a better job than a more complex, but flawed one. This sort of reminds me of Shuttle huggers who will say, with pride, that it is the most complex machine ever built, as though that were a feature and not a bug.