The Fallacy of Relying on Computer Modeling
By- Russ Vaughn
For those of you who are tempted to believe the latest government report predicting dire consequences for the world in the next eighty to one hundred years due to anthropogenic global warming, a regular contributor over at American Thinker, Dr. Brian C. Joondeph, provides this food for thought.
The climate assessment is based on computer models, attempting to predict events 50 to 100 years in the future. Recall the spaghetti line plots predicting hurricane tracks, each line based on a computer model, dozens of such lines sending the hurricane north, south, straight ahead, or harmlessly out to sea. If computer modeling were easy and accurate, only one line would be needed, reflecting the model that correctly predicts the hurricane track. And these predictions are for a week into the future, not a century.
When you consider that each one of those variously colored lines represents a short-term prediction by an individual computer, usually a week or less, and more importantly, only one is likely to be the most closely correct, it should make you think twice about placing any faith in computer models projecting out decades into the future.
And yet half this country seems willing to gut the American economy to come into compliance with the behavioral, cultural changes the Democrats have deemed necessary to avoid the calamity of global warming predicted by nothing more than these computer models. What’s even more alarming is that these same foolish Democrats believe they have the best models for this nation’s economic development. But most scary of all is that they want us to entrust the support and future development of our armed forces, to entrust them with America’s very existence as the world’s leading economy and military power.
This old skeptic can’t help but believe the Democrats economic and defense models most likely look very much like those multi-colored hurricane projections.
Note- Russ dislikes fanfare. I dislike not giving credit where credit is due, but I’ll make accommodations. Especially for Russ. AW1Ed
Category: Blue Skies
But Global warming is real!!!
It just isn’t caused by (to a significant extent) by humans. It is a natural shift of the pole as the planet revolves around the Sun and is attracted to other larger bodies in space. It is a process that has been occurring for millions of years, and takes a few thousand years to show any sign of repeating. How long have we been keeping data? The North Pole does have ice melting, but it also has ice forming in the more “northernly” area, since the earth is changing its axis of rotation. The maps don’t have to change since magnetic north is still oriented to land masses, not axial north. Antartica is also melting, and freezing as is normal.
If we are real lucky we will see the oceans rais a few feet, and Arizona will become a beach comunity, or at least eastern California. The coast will move inland, and all those silly peopel who spent millions to live on the coast will be rewarded for their vain attempts to resist mother nature. If not, they will build their mansions on stilts and have to take a boat to their vacation homes in the expanded Gulf.
Gots us some global warming happening here today. Lowest ever been on this date in history. Was the highest on this date in history in 1973. These “dates in history” being ones since they started keeping official records ’bout 1880 or so. Glad I still kept my long handles and insulated coveralls. Brother in S. Dakota had record blizzard Sat/Sun, my folks in Neb are shivering too. They will see some warming in their part of the globe about Apr/May. Y’all bundle and snuggle up my Friends.
Apparently, “climate change” causes everything. Literally.
It even causes earthquakes and new weather patterns on Mars.
I’m sure that the warming models will be “shown” to demonstrate that the coming mini ice age will actually be glowbull warming as well.
Climate change causes everything and Trump causes climate. It’s simple really.
Computer modeling is only as accurate (or as truthful) as the data used. Shit data (or made up data) produces shit results. ANY statistic can be manipulated by a statistician to mean whatever they hell they need it to mean. And there ain’t no constants in the weather or climate.
Just as Michael Mann about the “data” he skewed for his infamous “hockey stick” graph that’s been used as the holy grail for the AGW followers.
Yup! And even if you use the “best available” data, your result is pretty much an educated guess.
A change of climate is good every now and then.
I may head south for a few weeks this winter.
Get away from the cold.
Come on down to South Florida!
We will show you a good time.
We are having a cold snap here, too
It’s 50 degrees F and people are freaking out
I worked for a couple years at NAVAIR’s Warfare Analysis division. The PHD who ran the place- brilliant guy but never did figure out that whole necktie thing- had this to say. “All models lie. Some are useful.”
And is he ever so right.
Did some antenna modeling while working for an unnamed defense contractor. Test results from the range pretty much matched the model.
Until the antenna got mounted on something other than the range tower.
Funny how stuff works great in the lab, and then goes to shit in the real world. This is why all my tests are as operationally relevant as possible. Gives a better idea of how the system will work outside the pristine lab environment. That it drives the contractor insane is just a happy bonus.
My last job as an eebil government contractor was as a radio tech for DHS/CBP. Boss decided we needed to install a base station in the service bay so we could monitor radio traffic off our relay system. Great idea until higher saw what it was gonna cost. So we ran a standard Motorola mobile radio off of a 12V 30A power supply, tossed an excess magmount antenna on the metal roof of the shop, about 30ft AGL. Boss laughed and said it wouldn’t work. Hit repeaters that were out of reach of the dispatch base stations. Total cost: $0.00
SFC D; I ran a piece of red zip wire which I painted white from my Drake R7 receiver to the gutter drain pipe that ran up 4 stories then turned to an inverted el running across the edge of the roof. great DX’ing at night. No antennas allowed in my community.
Half of the fun of HAM radio is building goofy shit that works like magic!
The reason Democrats are so hot-cock about global warming is because then they get that much greater control over the lives of the proles.
Never, ever, EVER forget that control, not the “common good” (whatever the fuck that is) is the end game.
I’m guessing that this computer modeling stuff involves numbers. That means I’m out. No can do. No have way. I do get the policy side of this business and, yes, it involves more gov’t control and intrusion. My list includes aerosol spray, water closet maximum capacity, vehicles, gasoline, batteries, light bulbs, electronic components, and solar panels, to name a few. Reminds me of the reaction of the 101st troopers at Bastogne when told that Patton had arrived to rescue them: “#!@2## him. We don’t need rescuing.”
“I’m guessing that this computer modeling stuff involves numbers”
It used to. Nowadays the numbers are hidden from view and exist in the machine language of the computer and it’s software. Nobody cranks math by hand anymore. Take one of these “modelers” and have them solve an ordinary differential equation by hand.
Computers have taken the horror of Math out of the equation for todays genius.
It’s all just pretty colors and playing with software.
Said the grumpy old retired engineer.
Computers have taken the horror of Math out of the equation for todays genius. Depends. If you’re simply using an existing model and accepting its output without understanding the underlying model and its assumptions or its limits of validity – yes. Even if you’re actually concerned about those, using such a model lessens the need for doing the difficult parts of the mathematical analysis somewhat. But that’s only after you’ve determined that the model is actually appropriate for what you’re trying to use it to do. And that in turn usually means understanding the underlying math and physical system. And if you’re building a model, um . . . no. Someone who’s actually building a model better damn well understand the underlying math well. (Or, more likely, a team: one or more scientists or engineers who know the math describing the physical process involved, one or more computer scientists who understand digital algorithms appropriate for the physical system involved and its underlying math, and one or more good coders.) And they better also understand the physical system being modeled and its limitations, too. Otherwise the model will very likely be little more than very expensive but useless code. That said, a good digital model can let you do things that simply can’t be done in reasonable time otherwise. Case in point: aerodynamic design. Navier-Stokes is an absolute bear to solve analytically for any kind of complex shape (if a solution even exists). Digital approximations for that and other differential equations have existed for years (some for literally over a century) – but required so much drudge-work calculation that they were nearly as painful as trying to solve the analytical case. By about the 1980s or 1990s, that had changed; supercomputers did the drudge-work calculations quickly. Couple that with massively parallel computers running commercially available microprocessors, and for many cases the work became relatively do-able (many relevant problems are amenable to parallelization). And it allowed you to do it again, and again, and again – in order to model the whole desired flight regime. Or to do it at a higher… Read more »
“I’m guessing that this computer modeling stuff involves numbers”
I’m angry at numbers. There’s like… too many of them.
I can understand your frustration. After all, numbers go to infinity and beyond.
In the digital world there are only two numbers. One and Zero.
Well, I just know is freezing ass here in Fort Benning. It was my turn to do the crossing guard for the kidz to go to school, and my Army issued snivel gear was highly ineffective. 31 degrees.
31 is t-shirt weather around these parts. The other day when it dipped down to around 10 I found myself outside taking out the garbage thinking I’ll soon have to start wearing shoes or at least socks to do this.
Here if it hits above 0 people are out on their decks firing up the grills.
“Computer modelling” is a fancy way of saying “guessing”, “crystal ball gazing”, or “tea leaf reading”. Makes educated people feel smart.
I will take issue with the good (medical) doctor’s position – he may be a fine physician, but he’s certainly not a statistician, mathematician or computer scientist. Yes, computers are inaccurate at anything using real numbers. Have a modern computer calculate the value of 1.2 – 1.0, and you won’t get 0.2. You’ll get something just less than that. There are fundamental issues with representing values like that accurately in the binary format used by every digital computer. And yet, every day, jets fly using engines designed by computers. The calculation of turbulent airflow over a wing is fundamentally inaccurate – it’s a chaotic system. Run the same simulation twice, with slightly different starting conditions, and you’ll get vortices forming at different times, tracer particles going different places, and the answers won’t match, at least exactly. But there will be statistical measures of these simulations that point towards the same conclusion – eg, lift, drag, stress, etc. will fall within a similar range. Computers aren’t accurate and don’t give you the answer, they give an answer, for a given set of inputs, and, after multiple simulations, those answers give you a range that’s accurate. Getting back to climate, it’s also a chaotic system, and any specific simulation is going to give results that differ from another simulation. This is the nature of simulation and applies equally to climate, as it does to CFD for wing design, or neutron paths in atomic weaponry, or X-rays in radiation dosimetry for cancer treatment, or any other system with numerical uncertainty. But scientists are aware of this, and don’t run a simulation and say, “Aha! This is what we’re going to see, exactly!”. Instead, they run many of them, and perform a statistical analysis of the results. Can we tell, accurately, what the temperature in Cleveland, Ohio is going to be in 200 years? No, of course not. The models can’t give us that specificity, just as we can’t say how many neutrons will collide with radioactive material in a weapon. But in the latter case we can say enough will that we’re certain… Read more »
I think the main problem people with the global warming predictions is that the most accepted model is not based on flawed or skewed data, it’s based on a blatant, proven lie. Kind of taints the rest of the models.
If you can give me a little more info, I’ll try to give a better answer – I’m honestly not sure what you mean when you say the model is based on a lie. If you’re talking about the Mann ‘hockey stick’, that was a reconstruction of past climate via ‘proxies’, and not a computer model. There were some issues with the data, and some questions about the statistical methods, but other experiments have backed up the general trend, if not the exact shape of that plot.
The computer models, on the other hand, are generally based on physical principles (eg, fluid dynamics, radiation physics, and approximations of small-scale physical processes that are much smaller than the ‘grid’ resolution of a model, since they’re always approximations). There’s plenty of issues with the approximations, and numerical issues with even fundamental equations, but this is also true in other modeling enterprises like the ones I mention.
I think the other thing I should point out is that there’s some semantics at play here – the models are limited in accuracy by any number of features, just as a weapon can be limited in accuracy by various things (rifling, ammunition, wind, humidity, etc), but they’re both still ‘accurate’.
“There were some issues with the data”.
The data was found to be incorrect. Mann knew it was incorrect, yet allowed his research to become the holy grail of the climate change crowd. And that would qualify as a lie.
Mann admitted that it was a lie. He put it in writing in his e-mails from the Climategate debacle.
He’s never been after anything except fat grants, and because Penn State gets half of his grant money, they don’t give a crap what he says or does.
My recollection may be hazy, but that seems a bit of a misread of the Mann e-mail. Care to share where you see that?
Of course, as explained elsewhere, Mann’s work on a historical reconstruction of climate via proxies has jack all to do with the numerical models, which is all I’ve talked about. That’s like saying that because Anil Potti falsified data on cancer research, any cancer research is thereby bunk.
Mann refused discovery in Canada and so lost his case. In Canada, the man is, legally, a liar. Mann is also trying to avoid discovery in his case against Mark Steyn. He will, if he continues, find himself deep in trouble in the US as well.
The Global Warming/ Climate change case depends not just on faulty data, but on lies. NOAA and NASA got caught “adjusting” the data. Mann got caught adjusting out the Medieval warm so he could get his “hockey stick.” I don’t think he admitted to a lie directly in his emails, but his “data” certainly outs him as a fraud and liar.
Well, with that demonstration of superior knowledge, could you please continue by explaining why it is politically liberal European and North American governments, not the Chinese, Indians or Russians, who buy into this anthropogenic global warming fear with such enthusiasm? For that matter, a huge number of American scientists don’t accept the media fear mongering hype either, yet we don’t hear their voices because what they have to say disputes the liberal narrative that fossil fuels are bad and electricity/wind are good.
Computer projections far into the future are suspect enough without having their input heavily influenced by a certain political stance that is so frequently proven to be indisputably wrong. Makes me wonder how many computer models predicted that the Chevy Volt would be a huge success.
Well, I don’t buy into the ‘fear mongering’ either – I think the models are useful, and can’t mount a reasonable contradiction of the conclusion of the climate scientists… but all of their predictions are based on people doing nothing. I have a little faith that a society which can send people to the moon and back can, probably, engineer some solutions to the doom and gloom scenarios the media likes to hype up.
That said, while I can’t speak to the Russians or Indians, China’s tune on climate change has changed pretty radically over the past decade – they’re in with those dirty liberals who have some trust in the people who study this stuff now.
The funny thing about running simulations ‘far into the future’ is that the computer has no concept of time. In this case it’d be running for some large number of steps, and we do it all the time with other domains, from drug design to astrophysics. Is all of that bunk too?
“The funny thing about running simulations ‘far into the future’ is that the computer has no concept of time.”
LC, doesn’t that computer have to rely on assumptions based on past and current events, fed into it by humans who may or may not conduct that input in accordance with their personal interpretations of those events?
And may not those interpretations, even if but ever so slightly, be tainted by human political beliefs and aspirations? And may not even those slight deviations in input become magnified by the scale of the program in terms of the time over which events are being predicted?
Further, are you going to try to tell us, in the face of Mann’s tip-of-the-iceberg fraud, that scientific research can’t be bent by a desire for outcomes that support the political beliefs of the researchers funding sources?
As is often said on this site, “Don’t be pissing down my leg and telling me it’s raining.”
My point was that if you think climate science is bunk because it projects the climate 1M steps into the future, but you accept modern biological simulations that routinely do 1M steps, complete with similar numerical issues, then you seem to have a bias against one model, not a point based on principle.
As for climate simulations using assumptions or data that may be tainted by personal beliefs, sure, but other scientists would correct it. Most of these models are supported by a broad community of hundreds or thousands of users, and frankly, young up and coming scientists make their mark by showing how their predecessors got things wrong. That is, by correcting those biases with better theories or data.
You can think the doom and gloom scenarios some climate scientists project are total garbage, but my point here was that the models have a lot of validity as a scientific tool, and are getting better and better all the time. Even if they’re still far from ‘perfect’, if such a thing can even exist for a model.
There is an acid test of a model – it must work. We use models all the time in engineering design. All of Physics depends on models. That’s what the math is all about in Science and Engineering.
The problem climate modeling has is that the assumptions are simply not sufficient. Modeling climate is an exercise in chaos theory. Change one small parameter, and you can get an entirely different answer. That, in a nutshell is why climate modeling has been such a abject failure.
We do use models to predict weather, but that is a short term thing. What Mann and others have done is simply fraudulent. There is too much going on in the entire star system that we do not understand and, consequently prevents any sort of accurate modeling to be useful.
You may think those “models” are useful, but the only thing they have been used for for is to promote a hoax. To a fraud like Mann, that is useful, so long as the grant checks keep coming.
Once again, Mann is a completely separate issue as his work had nothing to do with modeling, and was instead a reconstruction of past climate based on sparse proxies. To equate the two is like saying a computer model of galaxy formation is false because some other astrophysicist, in a completely independent experiment, fudged some images he got from a telescope. The former is not based on the latter, so there’s no connection.
As for chaos, physicists study chaotic systems all the time. Turbulent combustion is another challenging problem where chaos reigns and yet we do computational models of it every day. Chaotic systems aren’t predictable, but they are most definitely still amenable to statistical analysis.
“Have a modern computer calculate the value of 1.2 – 1.0, and you won’t get 0.2”
You need a new computer.
“with climate it’s all junk science.”
Pretty much. When the “climate experts” can tell me what the temperature of the Earth *should* be, and how much we are off, I may give them a bit more credence.
And hiding the data and models for as long as they could doesn’t give them much credibility, either.
Here’s a link for a computer code that calculates exactly that:
http://cpp.sh/2nmhe
Why would they tell you something for which there isn’t an answer? They can tell you how it’s changing, and how that might affect things, but that’s like asking for what the average human’s weight should be. Somehow I don’t think the average for an adult Samoan man is going to be on par with, say, a French toddler.
Most of the models are open source, and you can download and run them yourself – including changing any of the code or data as you wish.
“Treatments have, because of this, gotten better. But this doesn’t mean they were wrong before – they were just less accurate.”
Is that like the media that were too proud to admit they expected Hillary to be President and after the fact said, “Well, according to our polls and statistics, we weren’t WRONG. It was close just like we said!”
Are you saying that treatments, when they were less accurate because it took time to process and the body change in that time, weren’t ‘correct’? Because many lives were saved by those ‘inaccurate’ treatments.
And ‘everyone’ expected Clinton to win in the same way they expect a football game with 5-1 odds to go towards the favored team. It doesn’t mean that always happens, though, and any of the places that discussed election statistics accurately could’ve told you that. FiveThirtyEight had, I believe, a 70%/30% estimate for Clinton/Trump. That he won isn’t exactly shocking. He’d win, in those odds, 3 times out of 10.
That’s just how statistics and odds work.
And someone eventually hits the Multi-State Lotto. Thus, you could win if you play!
It’s because these “forecasters” can’t even make accurate weather forecasts, LC. That much should be plain, right up front.
Furthermore, Michael Mann admitted that his infamous hockey stick chart was a computer error but he got a lot of mileage and money out of it.
Dire predictions generate fat cash grants. Now it’s all politicized. The spaghetti tracks for hurricanes are guesses and are mostly wrong, until the very last minute.
Why would anyone whose view of the world is pragmatic listen to a bunch of money-grubbing, arrogant blurbs who pander to rancorous quacks like Bill Nye to get attention?
The whole thing is quackery personified. It is far more heinous when it is politicized so that these quacks have an excuse to run YOUR life, and that is the goal of that entire bunch of do-nothings.
If it isn’t, then tell me when IPCC put out a demand letter for $122 trillion a few weeks ago, to “fight global warming”. That’s a higher cash hoard than is generated worldwide.
It is hogwash. If it isn’t, then tell me why my weather forecasts change right up to the minute a storm hits my area and there is no warning about power outages.
These are two different things.
With weather, you’re trying to say, “Hey, what’s likely to happen at a specific place, and a specific time, given limited processing time and this particular set of input data?”. It’s asking for an accurate, precise prediction… and for short time scales, it does surprisingly well, but chaotic patterns wreck it for long-term predictions – something felt more strongly with lower resolutions.
With climate, you’re saying, “Hey, we’ve got a model that has, at its foundation, physical properties and laws, and then some approximations because we don’t have massive supercomputers that can do magical things… what happens when we take this model and, say, double the CO2 output of the United States? What about the world? What if the sun dims? What if the ocean circulation stops?” It’s a laboratory with which to do experiments, based on physical principles. People make predictions from those experiments because they represent our best understanding, per the physical rules defining the models, of the climate system.
They’re inaccurate for countless reasons, not the least of which is we can’t actually measure future accuracy as we have nothing to compare it to yet. But they’re tested against historical accuracy and do pretty decently. To ignore them simply because we can’t predict the weather is like saying we can’t say people sleep on average 8 hours a night because you know a guy who sleeps 12, and thus it’s all totally wrong.
Oh, hogwash, hogwash, hogwash! #1 – There is NO WE, unless you have a mouse in your pocket. #2 – Historical records are dismissed by money-grubbing AGW science people as being either evidence of nothing but global warming, or as being completely inaccurate and/or hearsay. #3 – The entire climate agenda does NOT have a consensus except within its own warming-agenda-money-driven group and anyone who disagrees with them is targeted as apostates by whackos like Bill Nye and NYT op-ed writers, because “deniers” are a threat to their cash flow and audience count. #4 – James Hansen, the then head of NASA’s climate section, sat in a Congressional hearing in 1988 and swore up and down that the oceans would rise 30 feet by the early 2000s. New York City would be flooded and uninhabitable. It has not happened yet and when he retired this past summer, he admitted publicly that he had lied about the entire thing. #5 – Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick chart was nothing but a computer error, which he admitted to in a series of e-mails that became known as the Climategate e-mails. Yet, he clung to that asinine crap to get grant money, which has been an average of $3 million per year, half of which goes to Penn State. And they don’t care what he says, because they want that cash. This entire schtick is hokum, and has been from the get-go, nothing but a money-grubbing scam foisted on the public by the greedy, power-hungry scam artists at the UN’s IPCC. They recently announced that they want $122 trillion to “fight climate change”, an amount that is more than the entire global industrial income from all production. It is HOGWASH. And when you defend that asinine crap, you’re part of the problem. As someone else has pointed out, the volume and category of the most recent hurricane was inaccurately forecast. The entire business is a scam to get money out of the gullible. It is NOT science. It is being corrupted into a new religious order that requires stupidity on the part of… Read more »
It’s hard to keep up with your claims, especially in light of any references, but I’ll do my best:
1) Really? You’re arguing with ‘we’?
2) Which scientists are getting rich? And what evidence do you have for this? Historical data that has questionable provenance is discarded regardless of what that data shows.
3) There’s a general consensus among climate scientists, but lots of disagreement on specifics.
4) https://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-West-Side-Highway.htm
https://skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction-advanced.htm
5) You said that above, too, and I pointed out that others have, with different statistical methods and better data sources, reproduced roughly the same chart.
And I’m not defending anything about the actions climate scientists say are necessary. I disagree with their dire predictions. I’m just saying that calling climate models fake while other fields use similar models day in and day out, and having no issue with them, is … well, suspicious. Climate models are a useful scientific tool, with a foundation in well-tested math and physics.
And believe it or not, you can’t exactly ‘go outside’ and watch deep ocean currents, or multi-decadal changes to the jet stream, or other such phenomena that are important to climate. Unsurprisingly, a global system can’t be accurately observed from the rocking chair on your porch.
LC: Sorry, hit the “report” button instead of “reply”. My bad. Quoting LC: “It’s odd to me that people can have faith in plenty of other things that are based on computer models (and chaotic systems), but suddenly with climate it’s all junk science” I have a certain faith in computer models when observational studies demonstrate that the computer model works correctly. Observational studies of temperature have clearly shown that climate science computer models grossly overstate predictive temperatures. Obviously something is fundamentally wrong with the models. Running iteration after iteration of a flawed model will only get a more precise flawed result – accuracy versus precision. The climate models are not even close to being accurate. As for climate science being called junk science, I would concede there is some decent science being performed on climate issues. I have read scores of journal articles where I thought the scientific method was being properly applied to the subject matter being studied, but invariably in the conclusion there would be a magic attribution, pulled out of thin air, to global warming for the study’s results. Off the top of my head, I remember an aerosol study: good methodology and a reasonable analysis of an increase in some particulate. In the conclusion, the authors attributed the increase to global warming. There was nothing in the study to indicate why global warming was causing the increase. Good science or junk science? You decide, but I know which way I fall. Then there is the mathematics being used within climate models. McIntyre and McKittrick thoroughly destroyed the mathematics used by Mann as being junk. My suspicion is that this is one of the fatal flaws of climate science models, and not to mention that (as you have correctly point out) climate is a chaotic system where the math gets exceedingly complex. It will be many, many years before we have a handle on all of the parameters involved with climate. Climate computer models have a long ways to go to be predictive. There is a fatal flaw, or many flaws, in the present day models.… Read more »
PS: for those here not familiar with the accuracy versus precision issue found in statistics, it can be simply envisioned with the following analogy.
You are at a shooting range. You shoot ten rounds at the target. All rounds are in an MOH of .25″. Very nice. That is precision. Unfortunately you are one foot to the left and 6″ high. That is inaccuracy. Your computer (brain) is doing a very precise job of coordinating your eyes and muscles, but something is very wrong, e.g. stance, rifle et cetera. This is where LC’s arguments fail with regards to climate computer models. They may be getting more precise as the computers improve and parameters are adjusted, but they are inaccurate which indicates something is wrong.
Oops, 0.25 inch, not .25 foot. I blame typos on global warming.
What was wrong in your shooting example is someone neglected to zero the sights. Now in the history of human behavior, we all know that never happens. Sorta like using faked temperature observations or culling out the ones from around the world that are unlikely to support your hypothesis. Also, remember there is no grant money for studies that don’t support AGW.
There is a lecture that starts off every Engineering and science program in the world, “Accuracy vs Precision.” That is then followed by an intense regimen od study in science and mathematics. Math is the true language of Physics (as well as those fields that apply Physics, Engineering being the prime field in that regard). Numerical methods is usually one of those courses and deals with the type of programming required to produce answers to the math problems you pose.
Meteorology is not math heavy and the fact that the climate models are entirely useless, for anything other than getting big grants, is understandable. First Chaos theory is one of the most difficult fields one can deal in, and is not very amenable to models. We can forecast weather with reasonable accuracy (except in mountainous areas like I live in. The the local weather fortune teller used to known as “lyin’ Bob” for that very reason). Weather, however, is a very short term phenomenon.
Climate, OTOH, is something that requires an understanding of things don’t even know. Climate modeling, therefore, is simply out of reach of numerical models. That fact is what has made made Mann, and his ilk, such frauds. they pretend to know what they don’t know, and simply produce garbage. I have yet to read anything by so-called “climate scientist” that buys AGW/Climate change that does anything more than disgust me.
Then you have quacks like Nye, who has a degree in Mechanical Engineering, but somewhere along the line forgot what science actually is.
You might want to reevaluate your opinion regarding math and meteorlogy.
While a current meteorology degree might not be as math-heavy as one in physics or the engineering disciplines, it’s not exactly light in math either. No program requiring both single- and multivariable calculus and differential equations – along with courses dealing with data analysis, GIS, and 10 hrs of general physics, with possible electives including field-specific computational methods – is going to be particularly “easy”.
http://meteorology.blog.wku.edu/bs-meteorology-degree-curriculum/
I have a certain faith in computer models when observational studies demonstrate that the computer model works correctly. Observational studies of temperature have clearly shown that climate science computer models grossly overstate predictive temperatures. Obviously something is fundamentally wrong with the models. Running iteration after iteration of a flawed model will only get a more precise flawed result – accuracy versus precision. The climate models are not even close to being accurate. I don’t think I agree with your premise that they ‘grossly’ overstate temperatures, but maybe we need to define what we mean by ‘grossly’? The IPCC, to take one example, has years where they’ve over-predicted and years where they’ve under-predicted. These are very complex systems, with flaws, and we’re comparing with -for now, anyway- relatively sparse data. The surge in satellite data is helping do away with noisy measurements from earth, and should be instrumental in delivering better models, too. So are there flaws? Of course. You can’t accurately represent what happens in the atmosphere over many square kilometers with a single point of data, yet limitations on the size and cost of simulations mean you might be doing just that. But let’s step back for a moment and re-examine what a model does. Ignore the annoying hysteria from some people. Ignore the people who blame everything on climate change. This is noise, and I find it as unhelpful and annoying as you do, if not more so. What does a climate model do? To answer that, let’s even switch even from climate for a moment and talk about a different area – combustion. It’s one of several fields identified as a ‘grand challenge’ for computational modeling because it’s incredibly complex. You’ve got chaos (turbulence), you’ve got chemical kinetics, and you’ve got many orders of magnitude in length and time-scales on which these processes happen. Everything is approximated, because you can’t do ab initio modeling of chemical kinetics. So things from reaction rates to stochastic (random) interactions are approximated. You even have issues with input data quality, because it isn’t easy to stick a thermometer (*actually, a laser… Read more »
You’re simply acting as apologist for fraud. To be useful, models must work, i.e. they have to produce reasonably accurate results. Climate models have failed, miserably because the people that wrote the models are pretending to know things they don’t know.
While there may be some simplifying assumptions (and Engineering design is filled with them), they may not cause the model to fail as a result of them. Structural Engineering is a good example. Structural Engineers assume, for example, that the force on a line of rivets or bolts along the same line of action bear equal stress. lab results tell a bit different tale, but it does not result in buildings collapsing because it isn’t too far from the truth, and the design codes make allowances for such things. The Physics behind Structural Engineering is well understood, unlike climate science, which, is we are lucky, we understand 10% of what lies behind it. Consequently, climate modeling is simple minded quackery.
Ah, yes. I’m an apologist for fraud. Because even absent any knowledge of his this stuff works, when teams of mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists and statisticians from every walk of life and every country in the world work on something complex and come up with increasingly improved models, the notion that they’re ‘flawed, but useful’ is abject fraud, but the position that they’re all in cahoots, or ignorant, is evidently the voice of reason?
The teams that write the models understand pretty well the physics of what they’re studying. There are problems with the resolutions, due to computational complexity, and constant approximations of other factors that are found to be suitably close, but again, this is no different than CFD simulations that happen every day. Look up things like LES vs. DNS for turbulent flow, used to model all sorts of fluids from blood flow to stellar physics.
LC: hopefully you will see this belated response.
Here is an article in which fig. 1 clearly shows the inaccuracy of climate models (averaged). In fact I have seen other graphs which demonstrate that observed temperatures are completely below the lowest model predicted temperatures.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/30/climate-models-overheat/
One of my pet peeves is the term ocean acidification, which you used. The oceans are alkaline and will remain alkaline even if all the CO2 in our atmosphere were to be dissolved in the oceans. The ocean has a gigantic buffer in it in the forms of dissolved carbonates, bicarbonates and sulfates. On a small scale, this can be readily seen in the proper chemistry balance of a swimming pool. The oceans’ pH averages 8.1; a pool is best kept at 7.2 – 7.4. Because pool chlorine is acidic, the water will rapidly become acidic without a base and buffer. Sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate are used to counter the acidification by chlorine. The buffer, prevents wild swings of the pH.
Yes there are local decreases of the pH in the oceans, but the studies I have seen have all shown that these decreases are in the average range of natural variation (which is rarely mentioned in the “ocean acidification” studies, and never in the breathless scaremongering in the media). Please show me a study where the oceans’ pH has dipped below 7.8 and not related to thermal vents and other isolated areas where acid is being released by nature or man.
Adding a personal rant to my scientific comment above:
The term ‘ocean acidification’ is an intentional misnomer by climate scientists who, if they have had basic chemistry, would know better. Until the pH goes below 7.0 the solution remains alkaline. One has to ask: why would they intentionally mislead with this term? Follow the money or ideology.
Here is an article in which fig. 1 clearly shows the inaccuracy of climate models (averaged). In fact I have seen other graphs which demonstrate that observed temperatures are completely below the lowest model predicted temperatures. I have no doubt you’ve seen graphs demonstrating that observed temperatures are completely below the lowest model predicted temperatures. They exist. They are, however, only half the story, and I’ll tie this in to the post on WUWT in a moment, at least as best I can – bear in mind I’m not a climate expert, I just know a little about math and computing. I’m inclined to think if you want to any academic setting and asked professors who are experts in climate, they’d have a better rebuttal. So, first off, why am I saying you only see half the story? Because if people were to show you results from, say, the 1st, 4th or 5th IPCC report, and say this is the canonical truth, per the scientists, you’d see mean temperatures that were higher than observations. If some alarmist on the other side were to look only at the 2nd or 3rd report, they’d see mean temperatures below observations. On top of this, though this is educated speculation and I’ll have to look it up to be sure, the figure shows an average of 102 CMIP-5 model runs. What’s strange about that? Well, there’s a good number of climate models, but nowhere near 102 – what there is, however, are multiple runs per model, some of which are projections of what things would look like with increased emissions. So averaging those runs in with the standard/historical data settings would result in, by definition, higher temperatures. To clarify, that’s a bit like saying I’m going to plot three lines of my weight, one normal one, one if I eat an extra meal a day, and another if I eat 10K extra calories a day. And then taking the average of those three, and comparing it to what my scale shows. Of course the average of something including increased values is going to be… Read more »
Hey LC, what’s your explanation/justification for all those so-called “scientists” who predicted we were going to enter a new Ice Age in 20 years, back in the late 1970’s or early ’80’s? I know there was an entire issue of Time Magazine touting it. Or was that some “fake news” back then. Maybe you didn’t see it, since you were likely only about ten years or less of age. Unlike you, some of us weren’t born yesterday.
I wasn’t as tuned in back then to this stuff, but my understanding is that a few scientists said that.. but even in the 70s, there were more scientists talking about a warming trend, and uncertainty, than those talking about cooling.
In addition to that, our models have gotten much better. I mean, Lord Kelvin famously said that heavier than air machines would never fly, and was wrong a mere 8 years later. Einstein didn’t think nuclear power would be viable, and was also wrong. That a minority of people looked at the data in its infancy and poor resolution and came to a conclusion they’ve now backed away from isn’t damning, it’s .. well, it’s science. That’s how the process works.
Here’s one such link that might better explain that:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/
You’re going to have to do better than SciAm. They whored their little selves out to PC years ago and have simply made fools of themselves through their compromise.
I heard an interview once on NPR (It was on AFN during a nightshift) with a guy that had some amazing explanations and data showing that the naturally occurring changes in the warm ocean currents affect global climate far more than anything else. He didn’t dismiss any human caused climate changed, his theory was that what we’re seeing now as “climate change” is likely the result of the earth sorting itself out after all the tons of assorted crap spewed into the atmosphere during the industrial revolution. Made perfect sense, I just wish I could remember the guy’s name.
Science is no longer science. How can it be when if I can pretty well determine one’s opinion on it by knowing his political affiliation?
Spot on, Cav…I automatically distrust anyone who tries to reassure me he is totally unbiased, left or right. I think it is a human impossibility, and that goes for Roberts and his vaunted non-Obama, non-Trump Supremes.
Does anyone who reads here honestly believe that new Justice Kavanaugh will be able to dismiss his horrible treatment at the hands of those sleazy Dem senators when it comes time to render a decision affecting one of their causes?
That’s laughable…
I don’t know that guy’s name either, but there’s tons of different ideas in the scientific community – and in a complex system, that’s not too surprising. One of the biggest problems the scientists have, in my opinion, is that in their haste to either be relevant (if you’re cynical) or make their point (if you’re not), they conflate a general notion of ‘consensus’ (because most climate scientists do believe warming is happening) with a consensus of how, exactly, the many interconnected processes contribute to that effect.
My point here, though, is simply that the models are in fact an excellent tool. More to the point, someone could literally download a model, set up a pre-industrial ‘control’ run where the tons of assorted crap gets spewed into the atmosphere during the IR, and then another run where it doesn’t happen, and examine the differences. That’s why these tools are useful, even if they don’t tell us exactly what we’ll see in 2200, for example.
LC, the biggest problem people here and out on the street have with the global warming or climate change science is the lack of evidence. Impactful evidence.
They make wild prophecies about the end of the world, the end of the oceans, the end of the human race, the death of the planet, how polar bears are vanishing, et. al. every year. None of these have happened. This makes them look like abject fools.
What’s worse is that everything is a sign of global warming. Salt of the Earth type people, those who farm, garden, or work outside, hear that more mild winters are a sign the world is warming. A couple of warm winters, nothing really out of the ordinary, and they buy into it. Then the weather cycle shifts and after having record snowfalls and cold snaps hear about how now extreme cold and snow are also signs of global warming. If you want laypeople to believe any of your predictions, you can’t predict all possible outcomes as proof.
I have another issue with climate change/global warming. So f’n what? How about these geniuses work on something useful. Curing the common cold would be nice.
I fully agree with you – the people who do this are .. problematic. But that’s separate from the models. You don’t run a model of the climate and get a screen that says, “You’re all gonna die!”. And, frankly, most scientists aren’t out there making those sorts of predictions. They’re sticking to their domain and write papers like, “Antarctic surface hydrology and impacts on ice-sheet mass balance” (googled, from Nature Climate Change).
And yes, the people who blame their shoes becoming untied because of global warming are also a problem. I view this as a political issue, really – people are so entrenched in their ‘side’ that they need to reinforce it as often as possible, so it becomes an all-the-time thing.
But both of these issues -this hysteria, if you will- are completely unconnected to the underlying principles of the models, and their utility as scientific tools. That’s all I’m arguing here today.
And what is the antidote for hysteria, LC? Is it not calm, reason and steadfast skepticism in the face of being swept away by unreasoned panic? In this Global Warming fiasco, we have the left’s hysteria being met by the right’s view of the issue as another unprincipled power grab by an ever more openly dishonest political movement. Had this business of anthropogenic climate change been presented to us in a reasonable manner rather than with Gore’s hysterical pronouncements and laughably false predictions, we might be less cynical about the issue.
But it wasn’t and as a consequence, we will be forever skeptical of ongoing presentations of proof from those who have indelibly tainted the world’s scientific community with their political overreach.
Too many cries of wolf that have proved false…
The antidote for hysteria is decidedly not ignorance of the very best mathematical models and scientific capabilities we have. It’s a reasoned consideration of what they can and can’t do, and how we can address their limitations. Outright dismissal is foolhardy.
If I’m skeptical of my doctor saying I have cancer -even if he’s screaming it from the top of his lungs- I look for data and talk to experts. I don’t simply scream at the top of my lungs that it’s all a ploy to get him rich and simply isn’t happening.
I have no issue with models which concern fields of endeavor that are well-understood, LC. Those are useful. And they can be validated against real-world data before being used to design systems involving risk to lives and health.
I do have a problem with being told, “We need to change the world because a model of something we don’t really understand to well and cannot possibly validate says so! Oh, by the way – we need more $$$ to study the problem so we can fix the problem before it’s too late!”
And I have a huge problem when I see raw data being repeatedly “adjusted” in a way that seems to support one – and only one – preferred conclusion (that of AGW). Let me “adjust” raw data sufficiently, and I can “prove” literally anything with it.
When we understand the Earth’s climate, we will be able to explain mathematically the various Ice Ages (only one of which occurred during homo sapiens existence); the Little Ice Age; the Medieval Warming Period; and a host of other things that occurred both long before mankind ever set foot on this planet and after mankind arrived. Until we can do those, any model of the Earth’s climate is at best based on a very crude approximation – and at worst may be designed to support a preferred conclusion.
Models based on crude approximations of poorly-understood systems are not sufficient for the design of systems on which human lives and health will depend. Ditto unvalidated models. Current models of the earth’s climate are based on a poorly-understood system and cannot be validated.
So, tell me: why should we make decisions involving the future of the human race – decisions that may at worst destroy the world’s economy, and are guaranteed to lower the world’s aggregate standard of living by reducing economic production – based on models of something we don’t really understand in any detail and which cannot be validated?
I do have a problem with being told, “We need to change the world because a model of something we don’t really understand to well and cannot possibly validate says so! Oh, by the way – we need more $$$ to study the problem so we can fix the problem before it’s too late!” I have a problem with that, too. I don’t believe I’ve made a single argument in favor of such – and, more to the point, I replied above to Poe that even I don’t believe the doomsday scenarios some of the more prominent personalities put forth. My point here is that saying the statistical analysis performed on climate models is garbage because specific weather predictions are impossible is, to use Ex-PH2’s term, ‘hogwash’. We perform statistical analysis of chaotic systems all the time. As for data being ‘adjusted’, I don’t know the specifics that you mention – though I can think of many valid (and yes, invalid) reasons for adjusting data. If you put a temperature sensor in the shadow of a building, for example, that data isn’t going to be correct, and given a gradient of how temperatures change in the shade, it can probably be adjusted to something close to what it would’ve been had it been placed properly. The good news for people so very concerned about this is that data in the recent past was pretty sparse, but with more and more earth-observing satellites, you’ll get more ‘raw’ data. Not completely raw, mind you, as there are still calculations performed based on myriad factors – cloud coverage, orbit time, etc., but unless you’re trying to make the case that it’s not just climate scientists, but now also electrical and aerospace engineers in on some grand conspiracy, and it’s multinational, I think the abundance of data should put your concerns there to rest. So, tell me: why should we make decisions involving the future of the human race – decisions that may at worst destroy the world’s economy, and are guaranteed to lower the world’s aggregate standard of living by reducing economic production… Read more »
1. Data adjustments:
Article.
https://dailycaller.com/2017/07/05/exclusive-study-finds-temperature-adjustments-account-for-nearly-all-of-the-warming-in-climate-data/
Base Study.
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ef-gast-data-research-report-062717.pdf
The article may be from the Daily Caller, but the study’s authors and reviewers appear to have the academic “chops” to know what they’re doing.
2. Regarding the moon flights: again, a non sequitur. The astronauts were volunteers and test pilots, voluntarily flying what they knew was an experimental (and hellaciously risky, as Apollo 13 showed) aircraft. They’d given informed consent. I don’t remember the IPCC asking me what I thought about contributing to their $122T demand.
And in any case, in the mid-1960s we knew far more about orbital mechanics and rocket design than we know about the Earth’s long-term climate. We had known working and verified (through satellite launch and behavior) mathematical models for both, and knew their error parameters and limits. We have neither regarding the Earth’s long-term climate.
—–
I repeat my earlier comment: a model that is based on a poorly understood physical system is destined to produce unreliable output because you don’t know enough about the underlying physical system to accurately predict its future behavior. Current long-term climate models fall into that category, and also cannot be validated against real-world data (we don’t have anywhere near enough data concerning the past). Such a model isn’t suitable as a basis for making decisions concerning the human race’s future.
Give me a model that accurately predicts the past for, say, 60k years (30k or so before homo sapiens and 30k or so after we arrived) and some way to validate it that doesn’t include a Ouija board, and I might change my mind. At that point, we might actually have a understanding of the Earth’s climate that’s good enough to form the basis of a predictive model.
The article may be from the Daily Caller, but the study’s authors and reviewers appear to have the academic “chops” to know what they’re doing. Except that it never went through actual peer review, and there are countless rebuttals to their points. Shouldn’t ‘first published on a WordPress blog’ be an indication that, maybe, things aren’t on the level? If their math stands up to scrutiny, why not publish in an actual journal? Contrary to belief here, if such a point were made with unassailable math, it’d be the cover of Nature or Science, not .. well, WordPress. Regarding the moon flights: again, a non sequitur. The astronauts were volunteers and test pilots, voluntarily flying what they knew was an experimental … Talk about a non-sequitur. Making the moon mission about the astronauts, and not the governmental investment in the plan, is like saying climate science is about the scientists rather than the science. We had a large program designed to reach a goal that wasn’t thoroughly understood. That’s the comparison. As for the laughable $122T number that people here keep throwing around, you surely know that that number was based off the high-end estimate of a yearly worldwide cost of 3.8T? The lower bracket was 1.6T, and that’s all assuming a 1.5 degree change, whereas lower would be less. That is a lot of money, but it’s also not just an outlay of money – it’s an investment in other types of energy, which amazingly enough, also creates jobs and makes money. It’s a shift, in other words. And while I disagree with the scientists’ doomsday predictions, it’s worth pointing out that compared to some other doomsday-esque scenario, like using WW2 as an example, 14% of GDP isn’t that high. I think we hit 41% in WW2? Again, I’m not arguing for that, so let’s not get caught up on the details, but the money isn’t for the IPCC, and generally budget numbers are talked about on a per-year cost. I repeat my earlier comment: a model that is based on a poorly understood physical system.. Your error here… Read more »
Yes, computers are inaccurate at anything using real numbers. Have a modern computer calculate the value of 1.2 – 1.0, and you won’t get 0.2. Not exactly correct, but close. Change the word “anything” to “many calculations” and you’d be correct. Integers are also real numbers, and barring an overflow/underflow computers give those results exactly when using integer mode for calculation. Ditto floating point math when both numbers can be expressed exactly as binary floating-point fractions. And I don’t believe your example holds if IEEE 754 decimal mode calculation is specified and supported by the computer in question. (smile) In the specific case you cited, 1.0 is indeed representable exactly in IEEE 754 binary floating-point format but 1.2 is not; your example is thus true. (Both can be represented exactly in IEEE 754 decimal format.) Change the second number to 1.25 or 1.5 (or any other number that can be expressed exactly in IEEE 754 binary floating point notation) and your statement is not true; those calculations will yield an exact result. The statement is also a non sequitur. The inaccuracy isn’t due to using a computer; the inaccuracy is inherent in mathematics itself. And the same is true when using a calculator, slide rule, or doing the same calculation on paper. Regardless of the base involved, not all real numbers can be represented exactly as fractions in a floating-point (“decimal”) form. Example: the decimal fraction for 1/3 is “0.333 . . . . “, with the digit “3” repeating indefinitely. So expressing (4/3 – 1) in decimal notation has the same problem; ditto irrational numbers like PI or e. The same difficulty occurs in binary floating-point fractions. Some numbers can be expressed exactly as a binary floating-point number; some cannot. When working a floating-point problem, at some number of decimal places if you haven’t gotten a closed-form answer you stop – and either round or truncate. That’s true whether a machine (computer or calculator) is doing the floating-point math or you’re doing it on paper. In a computer or calculator, that point is determined by the design of the… Read more »
I followed your 8:52 comment easily and enjoyed it. The 8:09 cmt left me mumbling, drooling, and shaking my head. I could have a decoder ring on every finger and still not crack that stuff.
There was a time when I was pretty good at science and math. Have long suspected things had changed. Hondo just proved I was at least right about that part.
(OWB wanders off mumbling, kicking dirt, and feeling totally inadequate.)
With a few exceptions, the math’s pretty much the same as it was 40+ years ago. But the tools available today are much better, and allow you to do things you simply couldn’t do then.
Unfortunately, like any other tool mathematical tools can be both used and abused. And when they’re used to support an agenda, they can be fairly convincing to those without the appropriate background to recognize possible misuse.
Moon landing engineers used slide rules.
Yep. Three significant digits if you were lucky. Nowadays, just say ” computer model” and show numbers with a lot of digits and the world is your oyster.
You could get four with a large K&E.
It came with a gun leather holster and a bottle of talc. A jewelers loupe helped.
Ah, YES! Fondly remember those days. Physics was a hoot using those primitive tools.
Had great fun playing with computers in those days, too. If you knew somebody, you could get into a lab somewhere in the middle of the night and “talk” to other kids doing the same thing across the country.
Remember the giant wooden one above the blackboard?
Must have been 10-12 feet long.
And we still have an expression out in the field: “Measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with an axe.”
I used a slide rule in my calculations during my first several years as a nuclear medicine technologist. It was OK, though, b/c I was able to determine the uCi/mCi drawn by other means, such as a dose calculator, a machine that measures the amount of radioactivity present in a syringe or vial. Without the ability to verify accuracy, I would have been basically blindly injecting radioactive material. Sure, I would have been close, but close isn’t good enough when dealing with radioactive materials. The NRC and JCAH also frown on estimates. My first calculator weighed a pound and was about half the size of a loaf of bread. Calculators of that era (early 70s) were adequate for the needs at that time for my job, but bear little resemblance to handheld computers of today. I continued using my slide rule even after purchasing my first calculator … I found it easier to use than the lumbering fat calculator. Today’s basic, a four-function calculator is about the size of a credit card. They are so cheap, they are given away by vendors to draw customers. Good ol’ days.
Still using my HP-11C scientific calculator. It uses reverse polish notation. Love handing it to someone and watch them figure it out.
These people are idiots.
They can’t provide an accurate weather forecast and keep changing it right up to the last minute, when you’re being nearly drowned in slush and rain at just above freezing temperatures, and never once do they bother to tell you “Get to the store and pick up a generator”, because that would mean they’d have to back up that spendy advice.
So if an accurate hurricane track can’t be predicted, and accurate weather forecasts rely more on the sinus headaches I get ahead of a weather front moving in than on meteorology, why in the blue-eyed looney tune world that they live in do they think I would trust them to come up with an accurate prediction for anything in the real future?
They are idiots. And they want your money. Don’t give them any, and fire politicians who support them.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of modeling, either as a predictor of future behavior or in design – provided that the field in question is understood in great detail. As an example, the Boeing 777 was designed entirely using CAD/CAM.
Unfortunately, even when a field is well-understood surprises can happen. This is why selected wind-tunnel testing was also conducted on the Boeing 777.
The field of aircraft design is understood in detail (the Navier-Stokes equation governing the behavior of fluids hasn’t changed; and we know how to build aircraft structures to support a given set of aerodynamic stresses). And it’s also possible to test to confirm modeled behavior before putting passenger’s lives and health at risk.
In contrast, the earth’s climate still isn’t understood in detail – and probably won’t be during the lifetime of anyone reading this. And there’s also no way to perform testing to see if modeled results are accurate or not. Even trying to replicate the past isn’t adequate; we don’t have good real-world data concerning enough of the past to know if a model is accurate or not when attempting to replicate the past during testing.
Bottom line: when the earth’s climate is understood in detail, then – and only then – will accurate long-term modeling of the earth’s climate be possible. And I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Besides, weather forecasters need jobs too. (smile)
Bottom line is that the people pushing this AGW climate change hogwash could care less about the health of the planet. They just want to control you and redistribute the wealth of the first world to the third world. Then they can sit on high and be our overlords. The people behind this in the UN have admitted as much.
Hondo: you got an engineering background? Well stated comment at average joe level in engineer speak.
Some, including both systems design and T&E. So I had to learn a bit about expressing “geek speak” in layman’s terms along the way. (smile)
I sometimes wonder if Asimov was telling us something with his description of Selden’s psycho-history… tons of semi-inaccurate actions being totally unpredictable but being able to calculate macro trends which are indeed very accurate. Statistically he was dead on.
Much progress has been made in the field of projecting tornadoes for the near future. It’s not uncommon to seeing folks on the Weather Channel saying something along the lines of, “The weather will be ripe tomorrow for the formation of tornadoes in our viewing area.” That’s saved many lives and from what I have seen, they continue to make progress in this area. Those projections are of great benefit.
I remember Carl Sagan going on and on about the end of the world IF nukes were ever used. Turns out he had to create the scenario on a computer that left out the earth’s oceans. Huh? Yep, factor those in and your nuclear winter theory is as relevant as a fart in a tornado.
These changes in climate are not new as all the liberals and so called scientists want to make you believe. This stuff has been going on for millions of years. 50+ this morning in Delray Beach and I wore my 50’S/60’S era N-1 deck jacket to Publix. Even wore dungaree trousers instead of shorts.
I can remember when the snow was up to my waist. I was just little kid but I clearly remember it. Now it only gets up to my knees.
Bingo! You, Beaner, have just demonstrated empirical proof of Global Warming that is far easier to comprehend than all these computer models because so many of us have duplicated your experience. We can clearly remember snow above our waists when we were six years old and four feet tall; now it rarely reaches our knees.
I hadn’t realized we have so many STEM types reading here. However, none of you seems to have offered observable evidence of Global Warming more easily understood than what the Beaner has done here in a clear, concise manner.
Heh…
Question for all you STEMMER’s: How long does weather have to occur before it becomes climate?
Per Wikipedia, the consensus appears to be 30 years. But it’s Wikipedia, so maybe take it with a bit of NaCl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate#Definition
One lifetime.
What kind of weather, Poe?
I meant that to be an inclusive term for all the variations that occur within a given region.
Okay, well, then, the answer to ‘how long does weather to occur’ is longer than many human lifespans, regardless of age averaging for a population.
Example: does a late start to spring/bud break mean a short summer, or does it mean an early winter? The answer to that is “maybe, maybe not.”
And 1816 was “The year without a summer”.
This has been going on for millennia. Weather patterns were changing long before humans were here and will continue long after we’ve left.
As soon as we send a man to Jupiter, the climate change people will be saying that we’ve caused catastrophic changes to the Great Red Spot.
The Great Red Spot is already contracting. The theory from astronomers (so far) is that it is because of the influence of the current solar minimum.
The real issue with trying to “model” either climate or weather is that none of those “models” take into account that both weather and climate cannot be turned into mathematical models. They are part of chaos, which is not a mathematical system.
These keyboard geniuses try to turn chaos into something resembling fractals, which are orderly, but chaos is NOT orderly, nor is it amenable to modeling by digital systems, which use logic.
Chaos exists outside logic, and for that reason alone, including trying to forecast which way the hurricane will go or which river will flood and which one won’t, fails right up to the last minute because a hurricane (or any other moving, elastic system) does not answer to logic.
Er, Chaos is a mathematical system. Chaotic systems are not predictable due to a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, but they are deterministic. And there’s lots of mathematics on the statistical analysis of chaotic systems.
All this means is that for a given input state, you can’t predict the output. But take 100 randomized input states, and you’ll definitely be able to analyze the 100-different output states for statistical similarities. Lorenz did this himself for the ‘Lorenz attractor’ and you can see structure that exists inside the chaotic system. Chaos is not random.
If anyone looks at magnetic north you will see that it’s getting further from true north.. Theory. The earth is going to make a 90 degree turn.. The North and South Poles will be the new equator. This of course will take years… a little bit at a time.. But say 100 – 200 years, we will see a whole lot of changes.
That magnetic polar shift is going to confuse the living daylights out of newbie Army officers in infantry training. How on earth will they ever be able to find their way north, when the compass needle says “north is now west”?
That’s going to be a real issue.
With all the GPS stuff in use now and in the future, I think in 100 years you will have to go to a museum to see a magnetic compass.
Won’t be able to tell at all Ex… the average butter bar can’t find his ass with both hands, a road map, and a compass now… the poles shifting could only make that situation better…
I guess I wasn’t the average butter bar, cuz I could navigate on foot or from the cupola of an M-113 at 25 miles an hour. As a 1LT I had a dispute with two SFC’s about where we were in the triple canopy jungle in RVN. One of them climbed an 80 foot tree to prove I was wrong; he came down and admitted I was right about our location.
The answer to that is as follows:
1 – The Sun rises in the east.
2 – The Sun sets in the west.
3 – If the Sun is rising, east is on your right, west is on your left.
4 – If the Sun is setting, east is on your right, west is on your left.
5 – If the Sun is on your right, North is ahead of you, South is behind you.
6 – If the Sun is on your left, North is ahead of you, South is behind you.
7 – Pay attention to your surroundings and you’ll never get lost.
8 – Always have extra socks, Snickers and a Swiss Army knife in your pack.
9 – A creek can turn into a flood in less than 10 minutes.
10- Oversized waterproof ponchos make great shelters in the rain. Have some string for tiedowns.
We?
“We” won’t be seeing a damn thing.
Hell I can’t find an accurate 24 hour weather forecast anywhere is South Carolina. Haven’t been able to find one for 10 years now.
I’ll loan you one of my rocks. 100% accuracy.
Is that because you can tell it is raining when the rock is wet?
Yes. And if there is frozen white stuff on it, snow is falling.
I have friends in the Fl panhandle. When they went to bed the night before Michael’s landfall it was a Cat 2 with the consensus of the models predicting only a 5 mph wind speed increase over the next 24 hours. What they woke to was a monster. It was a Cat 4 and ashore within that next 24 hour period and the rest is history. Don’t talk about “consensus” to residents in the Big Bend for the next generation or two.
Garbage in = garbage out in computing. We all know these so-called scientists don’t check their political persuasion at the door before entering their cubicles, and we can assume based on history, with reasonable accuracy what that persuasion is. But politics aside, I can’t trust these weather forecasters to predict the weather 3 days out – why the hell would anyone trust a forecast 50+ years into the future?!
There is a Linux program known as “CDO” Climate Data Operator these climate predictors use. In fact, there are Linux distributions that offer a complete desktop environment expressly for scientific research and a hell of a lot of universities that use it because its “free”. Mann and Hanson earn their dollars using this predictive software. CDO allows you to alter your data any way you want beings the database it uses isn’t locked down to prevent being tampered with nor is it historical data.
The one thing these asshats over-look for their convenience is, outer space plays the weather fiddle for the planets. Its a farce (scam) designed to do nothing more than extort money in the form of cap & trade, carbon taxes, design and sell so-called emissions equipment that one state mandated back in the 60’s and used to bolster up idiots that believe they can predict and control earth’s weather cycles.
So, sorry LC. I highly disagree with your synopsis…
I guess I don’t fully follow – so because there are tools out there to let people change data, the science isn’t valid? Do you find gene sequencing software to be valid? Just because I can download my DNA, change some base pairs, and run an analysis on that doesn’t invalidate the science done by other people on their data sets. My fiddling with my copy of data doesn’t render the Human Genome Project useless.
More to the point, the fact data can be modified is an asset, as it lets people experiment.
You really do NOT get it, do you, LC?
Fiddling with DNA base pairs can turn every human on the planet into newts.
Per your earlier comments, I am part blobfish. How do you think I managed that short of DNA manipulation?
Checkmate, Ex-PH2.
Glad to see you try to divert and distract by inserting another topic in the discussion. Back to the Climate Data Operator (CDO) program and the results that are derived from it. Mann used it, shortened his curve by doing exactly what you’ve alluded to, rearranging and deleting historical data and then publishing it as true fact. I would throw out a long analogy but, I digress, sir. It was discovered in his emails with fellow researchers er, liars by the way…
That wasn’t an attempt to divert or distract, I’m honestly confused by your point. If data is on a computer, it can be changed.
The fact that there exists a tool to alter climate data is as surprising and horrifying as the fact there exists a tool to alter photographs (Photoshop) or the text of what someone else has written (Word). Which is to say, not very surprising nor horrifying.
What makes something published ‘true’ or not is whether it stands up to scrutiny – people delete data all the time. In the somewhat new field of machine learning, you routinely ‘train’ a system on a randomly selected subset of data, not all of it. Select different random subsets, you can get different results when you then try to use it. This is still valid so long as the results are not statistically too different.
There is no holy, immutable grail of data.
You know its cold out, when you go outside and its cold.
No. Is that how that works??? Dadburnit, I thought I was supposed to check the internet first to see if it’s cold outside.
So now, all I have to do is open the door a tad and stick my nose outside. Who knew?
mwahahaha