* The models are heavily based on extrapolations
* The models vary more than the underlying data
* Bottom line: there’s huge uncertainty in data, in models and in parameters. About as bad as it can get.
* And that, the uncertainty, is something even IPCC scientists agreed on, before the political activists revised their report. (e.g. see page 11 here.)

This whole thread is a bit silly… trying to encapsulate the entire discussion of AGW (un)certainty in a single discussion. It’s not so obvious.

Whose record?

Global temperatures are higher and rising (2009 is officially the warmest on record.)

“On record” covers a bit more than a century of very poor measurements, or ~30 years of satellite measures. Global temperatures were not measured before then. So no, we can’t reliably compare today’s temperatures to those in the past.

And that’s the problem: when we say “warmest on record” it really doesn’t mean much.

There are at least some similarities between investigating climate and investigating something like breast cancer. The possibility of missing very important factors as well as misinterpreting the results is very high. I watched an interesting critique by an epidemiological expert explaining why a very well respected cancer researcher came to incorrect conclusions – it all boiled down to getting the statistical analysis and (especially) interpretation wrong, but in a way that wasn’t obvious at all – the research was published in a refereed journal.

From what I’ve seen, statistical experts aren’t used routinely in any of the Climatology research areas, so the conclusions, to me, may raise some interesting questions, but don’t provide any reliable answers.