Monday, September 23, 2013

IPCC lead author Steve Sherwood likes this analogy: Earth plus trace amounts of CO2 is like a person plus cancer

The tide is rising
"...If we look back at the temperature record over the past 100 years or so we see times when the earth's surface was warming rapidly and times when it was slower, so in that sense it is no surprise,'' Professor Rintoul says.
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Professor Sherwood likens decadal changes in warming rates to a cancer sufferer. While they may feel a little better one week compared with the next, it does not mean they are rid of the disease.
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But Professor Sherwood strongly rejects suggestions that the changes are an admission of past error. He returns to his cancer patient analogy: If the prognosis is the patient is going to die, but there is some uncertainty on exactly when, you do not just throw out the initial prognosis of death.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But if the "cancer" is benign, you don't spend billions on alternative medicine, or run like a headless chook

Anonymous said...

Let's develop this analogy a bit further: The patient got a second opinion and was told that, after exhaustive testing had been performed, no cancer was found and thus no need for worry.

--- JeffM