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The idiocy involved is in describing the work of people trying to put together self-consistent and vaguely plausible models as "curve- fitting finagling". Curve fitting - as such - can predict the past wonderfully, if you merely plug in enough parameters. It's well known to be a pointless exercise - the stuff I was reading on curve-fitting back when I was a graduate student in the 1960s spelled this out perectly clearly - and serious academics wouldn't waste their time on it.

The climatology community does see some point in putting together models that more or less work, and they do test them against reality.

Let's have your ideas of what they should be doing. You are about as good an approximation to a climatologist as you are to an economist, so I don't expect anything useful, but you may succeed in amusing us.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Granting how little you know about science, I might as well be chanting "quant suff". If you knew a little more, my output might make more sense to you.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Sure. Of course, if we don't make that particular investment, the end users are eventually going to have other things to worry about, some of which are more or less predictable, so the IPCC will condescend to warn us about them, and others which are harder to model - like turning off the Gulf Stream - which are in the "too hard" basket, even though they've happened in the geological past in comparable circumstances.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The URL is essentially a review of the history of the development of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, not a scientific paper on the subject. The section is labelled "Conclusions: A Personal Note - Talking Points (pdf)". It doesn't represent itself as any kind of concluison to the document, but rather as the organisor's conclusions after he'd put the document together, where any pretension to objectivity would be inappropriate.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I was thinking more like sixty years ahead ...

There are some scenarios where it could. They all depend on not-easily- predicted effects, like the Greenland ice-sheet deciding to slide off into the sea as a whole, or loads of methane ice deciding to melt because the local ocean currents are suddenly warmer.

Nowhere near as insane as saying that global warming is going to be good for you, and ignoring the risks that it could be very bad indeed.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The quote flat out says they're hackers, fiddling the coefficients until they like the result. If you read past that he describes their method thusly (it only gets worse):

"...one of my runs ended up with no clouds, other people had all the water precipitate as ice at the poles, etc.). Once you get a set of parameters that gives a fair approximation to the known past climate, you can double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and run it again. The results from thousands of runs with different parameter sets are revealing. A few sets of parameters give no warming. A larger number of sets produces shockingly large warming, up to 11oC by the end of the century."

They should not be rolling dice, then proclaiming it destiny.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

A total cost of what?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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In both cases you've jumped to other issues isntead of addressing the one brought up.

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They can only test them against the past.

I can do a very accurate polynomial curve fit to the data from a random process. Its predictive value will still be worthless.

Economic models don't seem to be especially predictive either.

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Clouds are huge. They can't predict them.(*) Even a small error overshadows the entire alleged AGW signal.(**)

*See quote above. **So to speak.(***) ***Exonn-Mobil paid me to say that.

We've said all this. Bill denies it.

Bill's a denier.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Alas, their curve fitting does not predict the past correctly either.

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There are two authors. Are you looking for a total cost of getting what they both have in mind?

3.8 million wind turbines, 5 megawatts each, supplying 50 percent of the projected total global power demand

A off-shore 5MW wind turbine might cost $10 million, so that's in the ball-park of $38 trillion.

49 000 solar thermal power plants, 300 MW each, supplying 20 percent

A 300MW solar thermal station might cost $900 million, so that's a ball-park of $44 trillion

40 000 solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants supplying 14 percent

Presumably 200 MW., where each one would cost some $900 million for $36 trillion

1.7 billion rooftop PV systems, 3 kilowatts each, supplying 6 percent 5350 geothermal power plants, 100 MW each, supplying 4 percent 900 hydroelectric power plants, 1300 MW each, of which 70 percent are already in place, supplying 4 percent 720 000 ocean-wave devices, 0.75 MW each, supplying 1 percent 490 000 tidal turbines, 1 MW each, supplying 1 percent.

It's a lot of money.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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What they are doing isn't "rolling dice", it's testing models against reality. It is a procedure that does produce a fairly wide range of models, many of which produce similar predictions.

You've got a choice between doing that and doing nothing, and having no predictive capacity at all.

Granting your political preference for minimalist government, you seem to think that they shouldn't try and make any predictions at all. If you used the same logic on defence spending, you wouldn't have a standing army.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Obviously. This point is also obvious to everybody who has ever done any work on multi-parameter curve-fitting, so we can take it as read that this isn't what they are doing. These people are experienced scientists, not first-year undergraduates fooling with a multi- parameter non-linear curve-fitting program.

Certainly not the ones that James Arthur fancies. Your own approach to the economic models that - correctly - predicted a rapind decline in GNP and a rapid rise in unemployment immediately after the GFC and - equally correctly - predicted a stabilisation of GNP and unemployment after the stimulus package came into action, was simple denial, which is also the approach favoured by James Arthur when he runs into evidence that doesn't conform to his flat earth economic theories.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Some of the models thaty tried didn't produce clouds, and were consequently discarded. This is not "can't predict them".

But most of the models predict roughly the right amount of cloud, and fit the the sort of AGW we've seen so far.

Exxon-Mobil expects its propagandist to be a little less enthusiastic with the obviously fraudulent text-chopping. You aren't as blatantly incompetent as a propagandist as Rich Grise, but you are nowhere near subtle enough to be worth paying.

Not so much "denies", as "jeers at".

You'd like to think so. It would elevate your obvious misconceptions and blatant dishonesties into arguments, rather than the writhings of deluded fanatic trying to explain away stuff he can't understand and doesn't want to believe.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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If you are deliberately producing a range of models, some of them had better not work, otherwise you aren't covering the range.

John Larkin and James Arthur want to use the fact that some of the range of models didn't work as evidence that all of them were useless; all of them are obviously "wrong" in that a model is never a perfect representation of the situation being modelled, but quite a few of them seem to have been close enough to reality to be useful.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Something like it happened at the ends of the last couple of ice ages, and our immediate ancestors managed to survive.

Our current industrialised civilisation seems to be exploiting most of the earth's carrying capacity. If anthropogenic global warming complicates this exploitation to any significant extent, we are probably looking at a population crash, which will matter a lot to the people who don't survive it.

The most recent comparable temperature excursion would be the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55.8 million years ago, We weren't around then.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

..

The IEEE Spectrum article did lay some emphasis on the necessity of the construction of a super-grid to allow long-distance power sharing, and made the point that wind- and solar-power were erratic enough that their solution wouldn't work without the super-grid.

Exxon-Mobil - and its friends - have spent their propaganda money effectively. Nobody seems to be taking any notice anyway.

But it's wind-dependent while being out of synch with local wind- speed, which could be useful.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen