Climate Change Prediction is bunk...

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Why don't you just fail to snip and post the SAME STUPID SHIT over and over and over again, you stupid putz.

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I'm not sure what you are on about. When the US government was funding SDI I think about 1/3 of the experimentalist in my physics department were getting some money from it.

I hope you realize that those involved in climate research have a real dog in the fight. They get more money (perhaps) when they make bold (and scary) predictions. That doesn't mean the predictions are true or false, but it's easy (for me) to see that there's an incentive, for tweaking the data to the 'more warmer' side.

George H.

It's more scientific contribution to the field than Happer has ever made surely which is precisely zero, never written a single paper or published anything peer-reviewed on the topic ever, to my knowledge. He just parrots the standard lines for cash.

That is to say he's a working girl, not even as useful as a working girl because at least a working girl provides a service of value to the community while Happer earns his dough calling thousands of other working professionals in the scientific community frauds on a regular basis.

Naturally he'd say he was the persecuted one.

What kind of "incentive" are we talking? Like, whole _millions_ of dollars?

If I were going to engage in malfeasance I'd at least try to work in an industry where someone was going to pay me some _real_ money to do so!

I've heard the argument before and it always strikes me as absurd; who are these scientists that end up living such lavish lifestyles and have boatloads of cash flow into their Swiss bank account every time they make a prediction?

If one's that skilled with computational analysis/statistical manipulation/dubious ethics why not become a Wall Street quant? Make more money in 3 years than you ever would working as a climate scientist.

Yes. The best estimate of tomorrow's weather is that it will be the same as today's weather.

That's not a chaotic feedback system.

I've no idea who Happer is, but there are too many such people.

As a kid I remember coming across the concept via Sir Richard Rich in the movie "A Man for all Seasons". I've been sensitised to such people ever since.

Indeed, but that doesn't invalidate the analogy.

If you want to consider chaotic systems, it is possible to choose different values of parameters which indirectly determine the range of "oscillations". If you can see the range getting wider as a parameter changes, you might reasonably infer there's danger ahead.

Yes. Most fields of study - science, economics, psychology - that are not experimentally verified, are faddish and usually wrong.

Hard sciences have been ruthlessly guided by experiment. What's ironic is that physics is tolerant of unorthodox speculation, but the fuzzy "sciences" aren't.

There are hard analogies, like a mass-spring system and an RLC circuit, where the same differential equations apply, just with different units. Those are useful. And there are soft analogies, that just feel similar but without rigor. Those are dangerous.

Of course there are clearer, stronger, and more imperative incentives for those that have significant investments in the status quo.

So yes, academic incentives shouldn't be completely discounted. But the incentives of those with current industrial might should /never/ be underestimated.

It's certainly true. There can never be such a computer.

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Gore only made $20M on his first An Inconvenient Truth :)

The sequel didn't go so well. I don't know anything about the economics and business strategy of big film production, but the producers struck a deal with the theaters that if the showings weren't going well- i.e. large enoug h audience, they reserved the right to pull it. And that's exactly what the y did in a lot of places.

How can a bit error rate in a non-feedback system inform about the behavior of a chaotic nonlinear feedback system? That's an awfully fuzzy analogy.

Right. Like a hurricane, or a blizzard, or a heat wave. We just don't know which.

I don't think that the "fuzzy sciences" are generally intolerant of it, the issue is mostly that engineering, physics, and math have certain barriers to entry (actually learning the math, for example) and so there's a certain natural gatekeeping effect that keeps most of the true poseurs and pranksters out.

But what's likely irksome to e.g. social scientists is that so many whose only credentials are some ideas about stuff and an Internet connection feel that their notions are deserving of equal weight. Thousands of "unorthodox speculators" like the James Damore guy, self-authoring "papers", citing sources, drawing conclusions, demanding that they be taken just as seriously as anyone with a PhD in the field because well yeah I'm a computer programmer but I'm awesome and smart in lots of fields.

It's like ah hey wait a sec. You never "paid your dues."

It's why the peer-review process is ideally supposed to exist, not to create an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing thought but because on average scientifically-minded types can be critical, cantankerous, opinionated, disagreeable types by nature, good luck getting them to agree on anything.

If you can even get a half-dozen of them in a room and agree that a certain paper says something of value then while it's not a guarantee there's a good chance of it.

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I like your analogy George.

The difficulty in applying that to climate is that you're saying given the input you can predict the output. But with climate we don't know the in put. Or the net output.

The climate challenge is predicting the effect of (unknown inflow - unknown outflow), net of a pile of uncertain factors, multiplied by the net heat capacity of the living earth, to a very high precision, integrated over centuries.

That's closer to as predicting the level of your stream without knowing the rainfall, width of the flow, or the drop of its run.

Cheers, James Arthur

Neither you nor he can make such broad claims without qualifying all the wishy-washy weasel words used in that statement, such as "powerful", "subtle", "factors", "accurately", "any", "forseeable", and so forth.

I can easily think of ways to define them such that the statement is either true, false, or just as ambiguous, depending.

If he's making some kind of argument to non-computability in a "formal model of computation" kind of way then that argument is specious (as any computer scientist would tell him.)

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to know the exact nature of the signal and the exact nature of the noise. You need to know the magnitude and statistical distribution of the random noise.

y build as prototypes. We start with the specified characteristics of the dozen or so components, build a simulation and then build one in real lif e. How often do the two results agree? Often they don't. That's when t he learning process begins. We start to add in the unspecified parasitic c haracteristics of the components and the connections, adjusting the model u ntil it agrees with the observed performance in the lab. Only then can you say that you have an accurate model. And your model is going to have limi ted ability to accurately predict operation in regions outside of what we t ested.

The "current evidence"? What evidence?

Surely you're jesting. The climate has been warming for the last 18,000 years, sure. But where is your 'evidence' that it is or has been in any way bad?

That's a cultist's refutation. A scientific refutation would require that you disprove his assumptions, or his conclusions.

Cheers, James Arthur

It's no coincidence that he dumped Tipper soon after he became a climate superstar.