Re:Prehistoric Climate Scientists Get into a Turf War
by nkurz on Monday February 29, 2016 @09:56PM
(#11200504)
I agree with all of this, and was praising this article because it avoided the cheerleading approach that I think dominates the media. That said, one of the main contentious issues in contemporary climate science is whether current conditions are "unprecedented". Usually this concerns times more recent than those talked about there, but the more parallels that can be made with the past, the better we can model the future.
In this case most on either side of this debate are going to be on the side of climate science. The question isn't where our climate is going in the 21st century. It is what methods we use to determine what climate was probably like 5 million years ago. And in particular whether a particular closed and poorly audited data set is acceptable to use to produce answers.