Rhymes With Cars & Girls

Fire Megan McArdle continues to simply RIP Megan’s capillary to shreds with another great argument. This time, they deftly rebut Megan’s (semi tongue in cheek) post musing about ways to cool the atmosphere with what is essentially an argument from ignorance: the atmosphere is too COMPLEX to possibly know how doing anything will affect anything! Chaos, you see!

The person who I take it is supposed to be considered FMM’s resident scientist even cited the ridiculous Jeff-Goldblum-in-Jurassic-Park character as if that was supposed to lend credence to what he is saying, but I’m trying - I’m trying real hard - to let that slide. (Will his next post brag about how he can recognize a “UNIX system”?)

Anyway, I detected a slight inconsistency in this ‘we can’t possibly model the atmosphere it’s so COMPLEX’ point of view coming from someone who evidently believes¹ in the predictions made by scientist-crafted computer models of the atmosphere, and said so.

¹CORRECTION: The author of the piece Nutella claims to be a skeptic about claims of model-predicted climate change, so I seem to have misrepresented his views. I got the wrong impression from the fact that (despite the skepticism he claims to have) he writes as if climate-change claims are correct and reducing CO2 output is a worthwhile goal in itself. My mistake.