What Bob wrote was (archived here):
Imagine you’re running a persistent slight fever. You visit a new clinic. The nurse takes your vitals and enters them into a computer program. A short time after the computer model completes its simulations, the doctor arrives, advises you of the computer-diagnosed ailment, and prescribes controversial high-cost medications and treatment.
You’re not comfortable with the service, diagnosis, prescription or treatment, so you check out online the computer model used by the clinic. It is proclaimed to be wonderful by its programmers. But, the more you research, the more you discover the model’s defects. It can’t simulate circulation, respiration, digestion, and other basic bodily functions. There are numerous research papers exposing the flaws in the model, but they are hard to find because of all of the other papers written by the model programmers extolling its virtues.
Of course, you would not accept the computer-based medical diagnosis from a model that cannot simulate basic bodily functions and processes. But that’s the position we’re faced with climate science.
We need a second opinion for the slight warming the Earth had experienced. Unfortunately, it is not likely to be coming anytime soon, not until there are changes to the political agendas that drive climate science funding.
What are the flaws in Bob's analogy? Yes, they are too numerous for a blog article so I'll just pick out a few of them.
Bob's assessment of symptoms is wrong
First of all, Bob's got the symptoms wrong. Earth isn't "running a persistent slight fever", the temperature of Earth is going up faster than ever in tens of millions of years. Faster than ever since well before any humanoid ancestors appeared on the planet. If we don't do something soon Earth will be heating up more than ten times faster than it has in 65 million years.
There are other symptoms that Bob didn't mention. He wouldn't have known about them because AFAIK, there isn't a simple home test for measuring the pH of his blood. (It's not like popping a thermometer in his mouth.) For example, the pH of the oceans is dropping. In Bob's analogy that would be your blood supply getting dangerously out of whack. An acidifying blood supply can be a killer. The experts know the pH of the oceans is dropping because they have measured it. It is consistent with what is happening in the atmosphere. Much of the extra CO2 that we've been adding to the atmosphere is being absorbed into the oceans, making them more acidic.
Bob went to a shonky clinic, he should have asked the experts
Bob has gone to a clinic where the medical staff don't use their own knowledge, they rely on a stand-alone computer program. It sounds as if the nurse took his temperature and blood pressure and popped it into the computer.
It's no wonder Bob wants a second opinion.
Bob's doctor is shonky. He should have used his brain, his training, his years of expertise, and the years of expertise of others - as well as his computer. And if the diagnosis was unusual, as Bob implies, the doctor should have consulted others in the field. Obtained a second opinion, explored the Cochrane Library and other sources and probably sent Bob to hospital for a further battery of tests to make sure his diagnosis was correct and the treatment was the best.
Earth system science is advanced
In Bob's analogy, his questionable doctor is using a questionable computer program. Bob went to a shonky medical clinic with one doctor who relies on a computer rather than his own expertise and a nurse who simply measures his "vitals" rather than exploring Bob's symptoms in more detail.
One could compare Bob's single doctor mickey mouse clinic with himself and his excel spreadsheets. Or with Wondering Willis Eschenbach and his mathturbations. Or with any of the Dunning Kruger set at WUWT.
Bob's analogy bears no resemblance to the vast amount of work done by real scientists studying all the different aspects of the Earth system.
The Earth's problem is getting way more attention than that. Thousands of people have been studying the earth for decades. Bob's image of a single doctor and nurse working in a single clinic punching numbers into a black box rinky dink desktop computer is laughable. And even though Bob isn't the brightest spark in the universe, I cannot imagine he doesn't know that.
There are thousands of scientists working in independent teams all around the world taking observations of all the different components of the Earth system and analysing them. There has been detailed work going on for decades. Scientists have examined individual parts of the system and the system as a whole. Scientists aren't just popping numbers into a computer. These are people who are experts in their various fields. And they all came to the same conclusion quite a while ago. The data supports their findings. And there is a lot of data.
Bob Tisdale is acting like a snake oil salesman
Bob claims to have been "studying climate" full time for at least a few years. He is like the shonky doctor in his example. If Bob were just an ordinary bloke in the street you could argue that he can't be expected to know what's happening in climate science. But Bob presents himself as an expert in climate science. He doesn't hide his lack of qualifications but he nevertheless allows people to regard him as some sort of expert.
Bob's acting just like a snake oil salesman. He is making believe that if we all just wait a little bit longer, someone will develop a sweet tasting syrup that will cure global warming without any need to shift to clean energy. He reckons someone will find some snake oil that will be a magical cure.
In trying to add some credibility to his snake-oil solution, Bob misrepresents the symptoms and the entire body of earth system sciences. He pretends there is a little computer program somewhere that a handful of people have plugged a few numbers into and made a diagnosis.
Here are some facts and figures just from the latest IPCC report:
- 9,200 scientific publication were cited, most would have been authored by a team of people - so this taps into the research of at least tens of thousands of scientists who, in turn, built on the work of tens of thousands of scientists (or more) who went before them
- 859 authors from around 85 countries drafted the actual IPCC report itself
- 54,677 comments from 1089 "Expert Reviewers" from 55 countries and 38 Governments who vetted the work and help refine the end product.
Compare that to Bob's single doctor, nurse and mickey mouse computer program.
Beware the magic cures and wrong diagnoses from snake oil salesmen at WUWT.
