Climate Change Prediction is bunk...

If we are headed into an ice age, the usual state of the planet, and if we believe that there is a high sensitivity of temperature to CO2, the precautionary principle demands that we dump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we possibly can.

That's science.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin
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Very poor approximations to scientists in this particular case. Thinking th at the little ice age - essentially localised regional cooling around the n orth Atlantic - was caused by the Maunder minimum is the kind of nonsense y ou can expect to find on denialist web-site

Actually, it's idiocy.

We know we've already dump enough CO2 into the atmosphere (410ppm) - about

50% more than is has been seen in any other interglacial (where roughly 270 ppm is the norm) and more than enough that the normal CO2 gulp - back to 18 0 ppm - wouldn't take us below the interglacial norm - 410ppm minus 90ppm i s 320ppm, which is where we were around 1965.

It would be really hard to flip us back into an ice age from where we are n ow. You'd need to revive the Laurentide ice sheet and snow cover over most of the more northern parts of the Northern hemisphere to get the other half of the energy balance close to it's ice age level, and that doesn't look l ike happening either.

The risk is that we are moving towards a new state - one that hasn't been s een for 20 million years - which is as different from an inter-glacial as a n inter-glacial is from an ice age. The precautionary principle should make us more nervous of that than the improbable proposition that there is a po tential ice age lurking in the wings.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

That's a rather transparent attempt to divert attention from the point: following how denialists don't want to have their wealth and powerbase lost.

As for the quality of that particular report, others have made reasonable comments.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

It's like saying the "best estimate" of whether a computer program will branch or not is "Never branch."

It's not a _bad_ universal estimate for certain classes of programs on certain architectures, and it's straightforward to write a program where it's the best by design, but it definitely doesn't predict the outcome accurately more often than all other strategies for all programs.

In the general case just about any estimator which employs auto-regression or some other kind of memory effect will beat it handily.

Reply to
bitrex

Spoken like a typical communist. "How dare they want to keep what they've earned!"

Reply to
krw

Hardly anyone wants to lose wealth or power. But some people have earned it, and other people want to use politics and fear and force to take it away.

Exxon never forced a billion people to buy their oil and gas and gasoline and fertilizers. People wanted it, because it made their lives better.

The usual state of this planet is covered with ice.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

You're hung up on the issue of "accuracy" but it doesn't really need to be that accurate. You just need general characteristics and then you consult the historical record to see what the local effects would be. Don't even need to go that far back in time, tectonic drift and solar output differences wouldn't be a major factor.

Either the climate is generally dynamically stable despite human action over brief time periods (and in the scale of geologic time a century would certainly qualify, and the historical record seems to indicate that it is) Or it isn't. If it's generally dynamically stable despite human action it should be straightforward to model, or it's not actually stable.

If you have a computer model tuned correctly which can successfully can model the past (and many of them do so quite well) there is little reason to believe that they shouldn't be able to model the future. Which is kind of the purpose of much of science, using past results to make predictions of future events. If the argument now being made is "Well yeah but past results are no guarantee of future performance" then you have to ask why that should be so.

If the reason given is "Climate models have generally no predictive power" in the sense that they can generate any kind of accurate results from initial conditions then that's simply an untrue statement, many "predict" the climate of the past quite well, why should a given model suddenly stop having that ability as of the magical year 2018.

If the reason is then given that they cannot is "Well because human activity complicates things" then that's a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument, indeed how very convenient that the thing climate scientists believe is driving deleterious changes in the climate is the thing that puts it outside the realm of scientific study.

If the argument is "It's not human activity but some concurrent natural process" then again the burden of proof is on the other side; such a coincidence would be extremely unlikely on the scale of geologic time, why should that coincidence be so. Violates the Copernican Principle. Violates Occam's Razor. Not that such violations don't occur but falling back to the anthropic principle "Well it probably just happened that way" isn't science it's philosophy.

There have also been computer models of climate proposed by scientists who are in the anti-AGW camp. The ones I've read about very neatly dodge around the thorny issue of feedbacks by not including them, or at least no feedbacks complex enough to model real world climate dynamics. The ones created by climate scientists may be wrong, but the alternatives are not-even-wrong.

Reply to
bitrex

Grin, physicists love the first column of the periodic table. After that various approximation, iterative methods. (to find the electron orbitals.)

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Many of the people holding the power (particularly with fossil fuels) didn't earn it. Some inherited it from ancestors, some climbed the greasy corporate pole, some are politicians.

Others use politics, patronage, lies and deception to avoid it being taken away.

True but irrelevant.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

I went looking for ice ages,

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from which I found this current graph.
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(What's the deal with the dust particles?)

It may turn out that we want to keep burning hydrocarbons. Energy policy is certainly wacky, I was reading that Germany is importing wood pellets from the US.. wood is 'green'. To replace coal, even though the coal is cleaner with ~2x the energy density.

George H. Huh this is interesting,

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Reply to
George Herold

I disagree. Nobody would publish a model that doesn't hindcast fairly well. So all the programs are, as you say, "tuned" until they model the past. That's just a convoluted form of curve fitting. You can curve-fit random past data, but that doesn't make it predictive for very long. It certainly doesn't mean that the model is correctly simulating actual causalities.

In a periodic or otherwise well-behaved linear system, a curve fit can be predictive. In a chaotic system, like the climate or the stock market, a curve fit is not usefully predictive.

Which

Is Occam's Razor a fundamental law of physics? It's sure not a fixed principle of electronics!

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

I did some work at the square-mile Exxon refinery near Baton Rouge. At that time, they were using a billion cubic feet of NG per day, to fuel their processes; it's probably a lot more now.

It was awesome to see a chemical process that big. Running it is amazing; startup and shutdown are terrifying.

Thanks, Exxon. Your gas stations always have high-quality, clean fuel, free windshield washer stations, restrooms, and crunchy Cheetos inside. They have the puffy Cheetos too, but we'll forgive that.

When you consider how crazy it is to drill, extract, transport, refine, and distribute something as dangerous as gasoline, it's shockingly good and cheap. Bottled water costs more.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

I think it is one of the most stupid things a man has ever come up with.

Reply to
Long Hair

Yes. Plants love it. We have in the past few decades made amazing progress in reducing poverty and hunger in the world, and that needs energy and benefits from the byproduct of making energy, CO2.

It approaches genocide to restrict the supply of fossil fuels to the world. Maybe fracking can reduce our use of coal, which is pretty dirty stuff, but we shouldn't condemn a billion people to poverty to do that.

Yes. US forests are being clear-cut for pellets, to enable entirely bogus greenie-ism in Europe.

And this is scary:

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

I think you're getting mixed up with the *last* column of that table (noble gases).

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Reply to
Cursitor Doom

Nope. The singly-occupied s orbital is the easy one to calculate. (You still have to use perturbation theory to take account of the finite radius of the ionic core, unless it's the first row of the first column.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

But you're AlwaysWrong.

Reply to
krw

The Koch brothers want to keep what their father earned, and enlarge that in a way that damages the population as a whole.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Only for the last 2.6 million years.

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There have been earlier ice ages - two others on the last 500 million years - but even having ice at the poles is unusual.

John Larkin has made the absurd claim before, and has clearly failed to the background reading that was suggested at the time.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Right. Real systems, including electronic ones, can be astoundingly complex. When we finally figure out a problem, sometimes we suspect that some evil gremlin has been deliberately trying to make fools of us, using some problems to hide other problems in layers of complexity.

Occam'r razor is based on selecting from among the list of explanations that we can imagine. There is a universe of both simple and of tangled causalities that we can't imagine.

"Bad solder joint" is a good simple explanation for all electronic problems, and rarely the right one.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

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