Change-over to enewable energy

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Thats about as bad as arguments get.

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Windmills are cheaper than solar, and carbon capture is somewhere between the two. Getting realistic about the costs of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is going to make energy more expensive, but not cripplingly expensive. Since the cost of extracting fossil carbon from the ground is progressively rising as we exhaust the easy-to-extract deposits, we are probably better off going over to renewable energy soonner rather than later.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It could be that the prospect of finding a couple of provinces radioactive after every earthquake or a tusami in the vicinity puts people off.

Hydrolectric dams have been known to break in the aftermath of an earthquake - good for the tick, but not so good for anybody living any place where the floodwaters might end up.

Windmills are noisy, so it looks as if it has to be solar power - preferably in Arizona, so it can upset Jim Thompson.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Now try to explain why.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It does seem to be true that some denialists are hold-over "cold warrior's" a.k.a. rabid anti-communists - "Merchants of Doubt"

"The book says that over the course of more than 20 years, Singer, Seitz, (and a few other contrarian scientists) did almost no original scientific research on the issues which they debated. They had once been prominent researchers, but by the time they turned to the topics presented in Merchants of Doubt, they were, the authors state, mostly attacking the reputation and work of others. On every issue they were opposed to the scientific consensus."

It's a bit of stretch to define the scientific consensus that accepts the evidence for anthropogenic global warming in terms of their opposition to a bunch of geriatic nuts with irrational anxieties about middle-of-road politics, but since krw is right-wing nit-wit, it isn't altogehter surprising that this is the way he sees it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Marx was a loser, Engels a trust fund-baby. Engels was full of guilt, which Marx made a living off exploiting.

Nope.

No, I just thought you'd have read the seminal work behind your world- view. It's some pretty impressive psycho-babble, and the original source for today's class-warfare mantras.

Here, this is a quickie--improvements in productivity will eliminate small businesses, jobs, and crush wages, producing riots:

Basically today's sinister view, posited 160+ years ago. "Once we get super-efficient at making shoes there won't be any jobs for cobblers, so they'll flood the labor market, drive down all wages, everyone will starve, and the prols will revolt." But, his model lacked critical factors, e.g. innovation, hence failed to predict reality.

He should've been a climastrologist.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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But his economic and political insights were world class. As a prophet he was rubbish, but as a scholar he was remarkable.

Engels valued Marx for his academic and social insights, and subsidised him. Freudian speculations about other motivations may play well to right-wing nit-wits, but Engels would have laughed himself silly.

Well, you could scarcely be expected to agree with the proposition that you are a shallow nit-wit, and as a shallow nit-wit you couldn't manage anything more impressive than simple denial.

It was impressive when it was written, and acquired a lot of historical significance after the events of 1848. It's not got a great deal to do with my world-view, or the world view of modern socialist whho don't seem uch point in constrasting the interests of working class with those of the bourgeoisie

in large part because the working class now owns enough property to be distinctly bourgeoise, while the bourgeoisie don't have the same direct control of the means of production they used to.

Marx was good, but not much of a prophet, as I've said. He didn't really have a good feel for the diversity of the market or the advantages of small scale production for specialised products.

He kept his models simple and comprehensible. Getting them right as well would have been a good trick, but it wouldn't have done him any good at the time. The Fabians went a lot deeper into the assembling and making sense of economic data that Marx and Engels had pioneered.

Who also see the benefit in having a wide range of models, all of them over-simplified (to keep them computationally tractable) and each one illustrating a different facet of reality.

Have you seen the latest Physics Today?

Apparently the climatologists have found yet another model, which may give them the better insight into cloud behaviour that you seem to think they need.

Not quite the story about over-fitting a single model that you've got into your head, but your tiny mind doesn't have room for much complexity.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The capital letteres are yours - you aren't quoting the original article quite as directly as the quotes imply.

Again, this is text-chopping. It's the complex cloud dynamicis that get simplified - "glossed over" - rather than the clouds themselves (which was your 0riginal - ill-informed - claim).

There is something comic in your enthusiasm for writing off high class academic research because it doesn't suit your passion for the unrestricted free market. The book "The Mercants of Doubt" comments on the same tendency in some emminent physicists, who didn't know any more about climate science than you do, but were equally confident about what they wanted to believe.

For those who don't feel the need to re-affirm their prejudices, the original paper

I. Koren, G. Feingold, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 108, 12227, 2011.

includes this interesting paragraph from the conclusion, which explains what the climate modellers are doing - as oposed to what James Arthur thinks they are doing.

"There exist many examples of dynamical systems that, owing to their complexity, are not always tractable via the purely reductionist approach. These systems do, however, benefit from a complementary =93systems-based=94 approach (25) which seeks to capture emergent behavior, as opposed to representing the detailed process interactions. "

Where (25) is Harte J(October, 2002) Towards a synthesis of the Newtonian and Darwinian worldviews. Phys Today, 29=9634.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The only thing ad hominem shows is inability to provide a convincing argument.

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There's plenty of convincing argument there. The problem is that James Arthur has other convictions, held with irrational stubbornness, and defended by shameless text-chopping.

Dumping on him isn't ad hominem, it's ad automaton.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

An apt comparison.

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's WRONG." -- Richard Feynman

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It's not as if the climate models don't agree with experiment - it's just that each one doesn't agree with every aspect of reality with equal fidelity. Some model clouds better than others, others winds, and others precipitation.

Feyman had the advantage of working with relatively simple phenomena. When he stepped out side of sub-atomic physics, he was less dogmantic.

Remember him dipping an o-ring into ice water to model the conditions affect the o-ring seals on the shuttle booster that blew up?

A very imperfect model of the condition affecting the Challenger, but informative.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmege