Brexit hasn't happened yet. What were the predictions being tested against?
With any luck, the Brits will realise that the public were duped into making a bad decision, and - at the very least - test it again while taking more care to block expensive covert manipulations of public opinion.
Then again, they might just chuck it out.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Which happens to have been b.s., motivated by his incapacity to get his mod els to work. Much easier to accept that everybody else is cheating that it is to accept that you are incompetent.
Another right-wing conspiracy theory. Science doesn't actually work like th at, but James Arthur doesn't hang around with successful scientists (who wo uld find him to be ill-informed and rather too confident of his own - bizar re - point of view )so he's got no way of knowing.
That was his self-serving theory. Trump thinks that he is a stable genius . ..
Today's surface and ocean temperatures are weather, which can't be predicte d more than ten days in advance.
If James Arthur had specified average temperatures, over areas and time sp ans big enough to let weather average out, it might just have been a reason able request, were it not for the well-known (to anybody better informed th an James Arthur) effects of ocean currents.
Most of us have heard of the El Nino/La Nina alternation.
Since 1994, we've known about the
These effects do alternate, but the oscillations aren't regular or all that predictable. We should know more when we get more data on deep ocean curre nts, and some 3,800 Argo buoys are out there collecting it. The program onl y started in 2000, and it took until 2007 to get 3000 buoys deployed.
3,800 may sound like a lot of buoys, but there's a great deal of ocean volu me to explore and document.In other words James Arthur's proposed "test" is an illustration of his fat uous ignorance, rather than any kind of modest proposal that could be acted on.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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eGlobal warming is an observable phenomenon, not a theory. The predictions m ade earlier about today's climate have been much closer than "within an ord er of magnitude".
James Arthur cant' do quantitative thinking - or doesn't want to, because h e doesn't know the numbers.
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)
records a rapid 5 degree Kelvin temperature rise over about 2000 years, tha t is accompanied by a sudden drop the Carbon 13 to Carbon 12 ratio in carbo nated deposited at the time, which seems to reflect the sudden release of p erhaps 500 gigatons of carbon as methane during this period. The release ra te was modest - some 0.2 gigatons per year, peaking at 0.58 gigatons per ye ar - while we are releasing about 10 gigatons per year (and only some of it is methane).
The total carbon dumped into atmosphere over the PETM was somewhere between 2000 and 7000 gigatons spread over about 20,000 years.
That's the observational evidence (from paleology).
The earth got warmer (but didn't exactly fry). It may have blossomed, but n ot enough to be obvious from the geological record. It certainly didn't plu nge into an ice age, but the land mass distribution at the time isn't one t hat would have been compatible with the formation of thick and stable ice s heets - few are.
James Arthur is less than well-informed, and may be deliberately spreading misinformation - denialism is one of several right-wing delusions he active ly supports.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Brexit hasn't actually happened yet, so one has to wonder what the "predictions" are being tested against. Dan isn't bright enough to notice the problem there.
Far from it, but lots of them are mercenary, and produce the predictions that well-heeled customers find attractive. If you can't produce reliable predictions, t makes sense to produce profitable ones.
Sorting out which predictions are intended to be predictive and which are merely designed to keep well-heeled and generous supporters happy isn't all that easy.
In practice it isn't economists who manage an economy, but the fat cats who tell the economists what to predict, and tell the politicians which economists to take seriously.
That kind of fat cat is more influential in the US than in most other advanced industrial countries, where the electoral laws make it more difficult for really rich people to buy political influence.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Pity that John Larkin's critical faculties didn't make it.
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Perhaps not. In a country where the top 1% of the income distribution contr ols the country for it own benefit, that group wants to minimise evidence-b ased thinking in the rest of the population.
They don't. Statins were always drugs - with side effects. Nobody calls pen icillin "healthy". Margarine is a food, and it was advertised as being "hea lthy" but that doesn't mean that is was actually considered to be "healthy" .
Breitbart would spin it that way. Waht the survey actually says is that Rep ublicans are ill-informed about climate change, and don't take it as seriou sly as they should - which in part reflects the enthusiasm with which the K och brothers have poured money into denialist propaganda.
Ignorance is bliss.
It's more about the left being intersted in what's actually going on, and t he right being content with things as they are (no matter how bad they are) .
Not exactly. It took quite a lot of scientific investigation to work out th at global warming was going on at all - the signal only crept out of the ba ckground noise around 1990 - and the perceptions that it is accelerating an d is real problem are inconvenient to people who make their money by diggin g up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel, so they've spent a lot of money lying to the public about the seriousness of the problem, using the same te chniques and some of the same people who did the same service for the tobac co industry fifty years ago.
John Larkin is a vain and gullible sucker, so he prefers to see the people who haven't been fooled as over-anxious, rather than less gullible.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
And your example is? Most of the chemists in the world believed in phlogiston a few hundred years ago, but there weren't a few thousand of them around back then.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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True, but it isn't happening at the moment. The oceans are warming up, but the amount of CO2 they can take up is also a function of the partial pressu re in the atmosphere, which happens to be rising faster than the solubility of CO2 in sea-water is falling, so half the CO2 we inject into the atmosph ere at the moment goes directly into the oceans.
,
Clearly.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Wrong again. Butter and climate are different things. See this article: "EPA to its employees: Ignore science when talking about climate change"
174 comments to date. Most believe the climate predictions and trash the EPA.
I'll soon have black and white evidence about how much brexit
*will* reduce my income.I was planning on drawing my pension after brexit. I've been informed that the pension will be reduced if I do that. I've asked "how much?", and I am waiting for the reply. (The pension company is the slowest company I've ever come across at replying: 10 day turnaround and it would be faster to walk with the response from their offices to my house!)
And that's on top of the 15% fall in the pound after brexit.
plenty of ice cores, tree rings, and sediment records
-- This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software
Anthony Watts only cares about Stevenson boxes, so that's all that John Larkin knows about.
-- Bill Sloman. Sydney
Statins are probably better for most people than the alternative of clogged arteries, strokes and heart attacks even if a small number of them suffer unwanted side effects. I never liked margarine.
Brexit hasn't happened yet. The main effects so far have been that the currency crashed and various multinationals are making active plans to move their HQ out of London. Our government is making an unbelievable mess of negotiating the exit and we may well crash out with no deal.
ARM might still be a British company if we had voted remain. The fall in the currency made them an easy takeover target for by Japan's Softbank.
The problem with populist policies is that for every difficult complex problem there is a really simple wrong answer. Brexit is one of them.
It will in fact harm the very people who voted for it the most.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
And yesterday GKN fell.
Just so.
And when they figure that out, where will people turn? Probably the two indistinguishable bedfellows, the hard left and hard right.
Welcome to the Weimar Republic, mark 2.
Economists are definitely not idiots. Keynes was amongst the brightest intellectuals of his generation and a long way ahead of his time.
Post 2008 he is back in fashion again at least in some quarters.
I have had a chance to examine and play with some of the UK economic models and the main problem is actually knowing what the true boundary conditions are. They are forever revising national figures later because accountancy firms are so inclined to help businesses massage figures.
Spectacular boom bust cycles occur roughly every 80 years or so. Essentially it is governed by the corporate memory, greed and ignorance of history. The railroad bonanza was one of the big ones in the UK and is recent enough to have decent documentation and far enough away to see as history unaffected by modern political affiliations (it ended badly):
There is an irate letter to the bankers written at that time which is pretty much identical to the one written in 2008. Only the physical medium being speculated in changes with each new financial crash (Bitcoin may yet have its day in the spotlight).
Not true. If they do it right you can head off some of the excesses of the unfettered free market like wrapping turds in gold leaf and selling them on as solid gold bullion which is what led to the 2008 crash. (actually sub prime mortgages but the principle is the same)
Moral hazard is that the global banks are mostly all "too big to fail" which means that you cannot hold them to account if they go haywire. You have to keep an eye on them to prevent fraud like manipulating exchange rates, insider trading and other gross abuses of power.
Economists may be imperfect but they do serve a useful purpose even if some of what they say is complete nonsense. You cannot adequately model herd instinct which is what tends to drive irrational exuberance bubbles. Fear of missing out on big gains drives people to take high risks in the hope of big rewards whilst the smart money quietly gets out. It almost always the little guys who get burned this way.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
That's what the "disaster capitalists" want, because there will be rich pickings in the carcass.
At least one prominent brexiteer (John Redwood MP and ex cabinet minister) is publicly advising his clients to get their money out of the UK, since they will make less money here.
More like 15 lately. The .com bust, the last real estate bust, the upcoming copies, were all visible, but few economists said anything. I hope they lost big.
Yeah, *if* they do it right. But they don't.
Economic policy should add stability to the system, but few economists have the sense or guts to advise that. QE is an insane destabilizer, but macroeconomists love to play with trillions.
There are hardly any microeconomists. Economists can't seem to appreciate that the macroeconomy is the sum of all the micro-inputs. Mere millions of dollars are not exciting to write papers about.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Only because I read it recently, there was an example from the "the case against sugar". In the 1940's leading science was in Germany, they had a view of sugar that included it's chemical response to the body... the insulin response. After the war science's center moved to the US and there the view of nutritionalists was that it was all about energy balance, calories in vs out. So all calories were equal, and the chemical effects on the body secondary. (The sugar industry helped push this idea some.) Now those ideas are slowly changing.
George H.
PS I think particle physics has lost it's way. This from the bbc
And then there's string theory... a nice blog here.
GH
I don't think any of these things mean science is always wrong. It's just a messy human endeavor, a good history of science should include all the mistakes... "those who don't learn from history..."
They have in Australia.
We haven't experienced a recession since 1991. We even managed to sail thro ugh the Global Financial Crisis (with quite a bit of pump-priming spending) .
Australia's banks are guilty of a lot of that.
Quantitative easing doesn't seem to have destablised anything. James Arthur thinks that it has to, but can't point to any actual evidence of instabili ty.
He got a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on microcredit and microfinance.
His bank was profitable enough that the Bangladeshi government eventually n ationalised it "wresting control of it from the 8.4 million rural women tha t own a majority of its shares".
This isn't the kind of microeconomics that John Larkin appears to be thinki ng of - but economists in reality don't have any trouble with the idea that the macroeconomy is just the sum all all the transactions - large and smal l - going on in the country, any more than chemists have a problem with the idea that chemical reactions are just the sum of lots of individual atoms and molecules interacting.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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It hasn't "lost it's way". There's never been a neat obvious path for it fo llow, and business is all about getting more results and seeing if any of t hem are odd.
String theory has been interesting for a few decades now, but doesn't seem to be going anywhere useful. Variations like quantum loop gravity may do be tter. It's a lot cheaper than big accelerators, or even LIGO set-ups (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory).
It's a process of exploration. The process of working out that an area isn' t worth exploring isn't profitable, but it isn't a mistake either - until y ou've had good look, you don't know what you might find.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Science is often wrong, but in some fields the wrongness is corrected by experiment. Physics just keeps getting incrementally better, for example.
Areas that are not corrected by solid experiment can be, and usually are, wildly wrong, and swing in fads. Without experiment, all that's available is self-serving collective opinions.
Computers have enabled massive cross-correlation studies, which through pure noise in the data, turn up large numbers of apparent causalities. The noise correlations get published.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
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