Graham is spot on with the bit about feedback effects in climate models. The actual direct effect of CO2 is comparatively limited - or at least is not open ended. There is a saturation effect. The climate models depend on feedback - mostly they assume that the additional temperature resulting from the CO2 will affect cloud cover, and that change in cloud cover will further increase temepratues and so on. The assumption is a little beter than a guess, but not much. There is virtually no direct evidence for it. Yet we are basing major government policy on these models without nailing down that basic point.

The financial modellers have even less excuse for their behaviour. Financial models have been shown to be wrong frequently by circumstances. the real surprise is that many professionals were surprised.

Curmudgeoun, the "many professionals were surprised" by their wrong financial modelling because they were fed lies for years about how clever the dumb system was meant to be. They saw pundit after pundit praised as demi-gods, however mediocre (backtrack Krugman too, or read into his actually high regard for this monetarist rubbish and bail outs), and propellor-headed twits given Nobel prizes (and the USD1 mill with them) for the "innovative financial instruments" of the derivatives scam. Of course they were surprised, because they believed only their own rubbish. Such professionals even admired the sick system's idiot and degenerate guru Greenspan; no wonder really, given that Sir Alan had his recent book pushed unashamedly and expensively, as if he had nothing to do with this mass crime.

And we have to really, finally re-educate people against those extra, post-disintegration lies which keep pushing this nonsense about "sub prime caused the system to crash", as if the whole problem was caused by a minority of poor people not paying their house loans! Graham's article even specifies that the modelling scams of derivatives trading involved fake and silly assurances that the packaged debt was somehow a valuable "commodity" or even "asset". That's the point about the "sub-prime crash": it was the result of collective self-deception by delirious lenders in a system that had no relationship to reality.

Remember: the derivatives bubble bloated into QUADRILLIONS of fake USD "value". That's truly "funny money" - does not exist, cannot exist, and should not exist. It must be written off, NOW. Then we can hold trials for those who created the filthy beast.

Notice how AGW-ers fall for such silly misinterpretations of the financial system's disintegration, just like they fall for the rubbish about CO2. Whether or not that was the intended "litmus test" of Graham Young's article, such responses prove the compatibility of these two major falsehoods and sources of disaster.

As I've said on OLO before, in AGW/ETS we're expected to believe the same circles of oligarchical decadents who not only benefited from the derivatives scam - they even conceived and designed it!

Graham Young you are spot on. Suppose a cap and trade system is implemented and companies that have billions of carbon credits on their balance sheets as assets suddenly find that the credits are worthless we will have another sub prime morgage crisis to cope with.
Boethius.

"So it is with global warming. Other methods of evaluating the risks, like reviewing the historical record, suggest that nothing happening at the moment can't be accommodated,"

really? you're qualified to say that? that's the accepted scientific position?

"but the models say otherwise,"

you're really claiming the modeling is in disagreement with the historical record? that's the accepted scientific position? or, are you claiming some superiority for your magic envelope?

"and the weight of money and ambition has gone behind the models. As a result, we in the West are caught up in an environmental bubble economy where everyone is spruiking climate change."

so who should i trust: a scientific community of thousands of qualified professionals, working with the real science and debating each others' work on a daily basis? or, a political hack who happily slurs a whole profession without a shred of evidence?

Here's some from that real world of those "working with the real science and debating each others' work on a daily basis", bb:

1) Guy Le Blanc-Smith, retired CSIRO Principal Research Scientist:

"I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, let alone man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot spot is missing and the ice core data refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion? I contend that those professional scientists and advisors that are knowingly complicit in climate science fraud and all that is derived from it will continue to be exposed by the science itself".

2) William Kininmonth, head of the Australian BoM National Climate Centre 1986-1998 and Australian delegate to the World Meteorological Organization's Commission for Climatology 1982-1998:

"AGW is a fiction and a very dangerous fiction".

3) Bob Carter, paleoclimate scientist James Cook University and ex-chairman of the ARC's Earth Science Panel:

"Many distinguished scientists refuse to participate in the IPCC process, and others have resigned from it, because in the end the advice that the panel provides to governments is political and not scientific".

[sorry to b repetitive folks - I typed the above at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8409&page=0. There are many more such quotes]

The truth is that one cannot accurately model a system as complicated as the weather or the global economy until one knows what ALL the variables are beforehand and how they interrelate with one another. The fact such systems are manifestly evolutionary, episodic, chaotic and have lots of dependencies should be enough to make people suspect that predicting their behaviour accurately over the long run is nigh on impossible. (In the case of the economy, system behaviour is complicated by human psychological factors which come into play which are often irrational.)

That, of course, doesn't prove or disprove anything in relation to the global warming debate. It just shows that man's intellect isn't sufficient to answer the question of which path the evolution of a system will take.