Climate Change Prediction is bunk...

The problem with Exxon-Mobil isn't the good stuff that they do, but the money that they've spent on deceiving the public about the reality of anthropogenic global warming.

They've spent a lot on sowing doubt in the minds of the gullible, and John Larkin has to be an example of how well that can work.

sually build as prototypes. We start with the specified characteristics o f the dozen or so components, build a simulation and then build one in rea l life. How often do the two results agree? Often they don't. That's w hen the learning process begins. We start to add in the unspecified parasi tic characteristics of the components and the connections, adjusting the mo del until it agrees with the observed performance in the lab. Only then ca n you say that you have an accurate model. And your model is going to have limited ability to accurately predict operation in regions outside of what we tested.

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And James Arthur knows that because he's familiar with state of the art cli mate models? What he's actually seen is the code hacked from the University of East Anglia's graduate students programming sand-box, from the Climateg ate files.

Julia Sligo wouldn't let him get anywhere near the code for her models - th e climate modelling community has had to put up with years of well-funded m alicious persecution by denialists, and nobody wants to add credibility to bogus criticism.

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It won't hindcast the past if it doesn't.

John Larkin really doesn't know much about curve-fitting, or the process of extracting confidence limits from the covariance data that non-linear leas t squares curve-fitting programs automatically extract during the fitting p rocess.

I don't either, but it was routine enough back in the 1970's that I used it in my Ph.D. work.

If you try to extract more parameters than you data will support, the confi dence limits go through the roof.

Chaotic systems are still deterministic, and obey conservation laws. If you ask the right kinds of questions, and average out the erratic behaviour, y ou can predict some of their behaviour - after a fashion.

More CO2 in the atmosphere means a warmer climate, and more intense tropica l typhoons/cyclones. We don't know when they are going to hit, or how many are going to here any particular place in any particular year, but we do kn ow that if you are planning to build a beach house it had better be well ab ove sea level and engineered to survive very high winds.

John Larkin loves to invent complicated explanation for effects that he can 't understand. If he knew a bit more he might be able to come up with simpl er explanations.

Occams Razor is not a fundamental law of physics. It's a useful rule of deb ate - if you have two explanations for the same result, it make sense to ta ke the simpler explanation more seriously - mainly because it is easier to find out if it is wrong.

Particularly when you don't bother finding out all the things that could be going on before you start looking at them.

Narcissists do think like that. It's possible that John Larkin is a running a version of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, as invented by Douglas Ad ams, where

"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of [their produ cts] by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words?and this is the rock solid principle on which the wh ole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded ? their fun damental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design fla ws."

A larger universe if you don't know much to start with.

But it is testable.

Step back and reconsider that.

When we 'finally figure out' a complex puzzle, we've considered and rejected simpler solutions, one by one. Testing and eliminating hypotheses, that's the core of science. Starting with simple hypotheses is an economic necessity because science would enjoy no rapid victories otherwise.

So, Occam's Razor is thrift, as applied to a range of philosophical endeavor (including, but not limited to, science). The inverse of Occam's Razor is seen in the inventions of Rube Goldberg, and in persecution fantasies, and in climate change denials.

Hardly. The trees being cut are farmed in forests run by companies like Weyerhauser. They're all but engineered.

The wood pellet thing is another politically-driven distortion.

If one is to be a logically consistent AGW-skeptic then there's even less reason to believe in the science behind the biogenesis of fossil fuels, it's an even more obscure topic where the models are even less informed.

Abiogenesis should logically be the default position until proven otherwise; the null hypothesis should be that an infinite amount of fossil fuels should be extractable from the Earth's crust, converted into CO2 and injected into the atmosphere with no effect.

If and when the supply runs out only then will it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the supply is actually non-infinite.

Non sequitur

Sure, I can observe evidence of the Big Bang. I am happy its valid. I can't measure/infer the expansion rate at different points in time with any sort of high accuracy though.

There is not hope in hell one can make a statement that 11,344 years ago the temperature was 33.4 deg C in Rome.

Its only a model. One need to stand back as see the big picture. A one degree recent change claim is trivially swamped by all the other possible error sources over the last million years. The average temperature on one side of my room is more than a degree different from another part. We're talking a whole planet here.Its ludicrous.

-- Kevin Aylward

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Burning carbon that was hauled out of the atmosphere a few decades ago soun ds like a better idea than burning carbon that was hauled out of the atmosp here a few hundred million years ago, and thinning existing forests so that new trees can capture more carbon isn't something that Exxon-Mobil offers.

It may be politically driven, but that doesn't make less attractive than th e greed-driven extraction of fossil carbon.

In defense of William of Occam, his view is a bit more nuanced than that. Any theory has to 'save the phenomena', i.e. correctly account for the observed data, but for that to be useful either in physics or in troubleshooting, you have to have enough data of the right kind. Armchair debugging works almost as badly as armchair physics, and for the same reason.

Once you have all the available data (e.g. planetary motions measured to eyeball accuracy with astrolabes and such), you might find that Ptolemaic/Copernican epicycles(*) and Keplerian constant-areal-velocity ellipses both fit within the experimental error, which they do.

Occam's contribution is simply to say that if two hypotheses fit the data equally well, the one with fewer assumptions (or adjustable parameters) should be preferred, and that strongly favours the ellipses. Seems reasonable to me, both in physics and in debugging.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) Copernicus's system was the same as Ptolemy's except that he noticed that all the superior planets had a one-year epicycle that went away when he put the Sun at the centre. That's why nobody except astronomers paid any attention to him.

Back in the '70s big TV early solid state days they (Japan, etc.) ran the single sided (typically) PCBs thru the wave solder so fast that some still had icicles on 'em.

Back then... a bad solder joint or via usually WAS the cause of a failed PCB assembly. Components were reliable for the most part, so a bad connection was the first thing I would go hunting for and usually find.

In the tube days, I could fix 'em simply by wiggling the tubes in their sockets enough that the pins all got wiped and burnished and renewed by the socket contacts. Voila' TV worky again.

With the upright video games we had to charge the customer a minimum of a half hour labor for a tech visit, and a PacMan had this habit of the edge connector fingers getting oxidized enough to lose contact with the card edge connector header. We would show up, and see the 'garbage' on the screen where it failed to boot up, and power down and pop that edge connector on and off and back on the board, and sit and wait for whatever remaining minutes there were so as not to piss off the game room operator, and power on and look! It works again.

Chaos... even ordered or predicted chaos, is far more precise than "Occam's Razor" ever was or ever could be.

Man's mind is far more capable than we give ourselves credit for.

Look at the Harlem Globe Trotters.,, How the f*ck???... do they hit that swish from half court with their back to the rim?

How do I shoot perfect masse shots at will when I am stuck behind a ball in pool?

How do I see into two and three rail bank shots for that matter?

That is mastery of fairly complex yet 'ordered' chaotic systems. How do those nine ball boys consistenly bring the one ball of the apex of the rack to the side pocket?

F*ck Occam's Razor.

unds like a better idea than burning carbon that was hauled out of the atmo sphere a few hundred million years ago, and thinning existing forests so th at new trees can capture more carbon isn't something that Exxon-Mobil offer s.

the greed-driven extraction of fossil carbon.

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Dan

Wow. Dan thinks he knows enough to rate other people's posts.

He doesn't realise that nobody is going to take him seriously until he says what he likes or dislikes in a post - not that there's much chance that we 'd take him any more seriously if we knew more about what he had in mind. T here doesn't seem to be much in there at the best of times.

What's even more fun is that, in a real system with a real problem, some number of available observations or measurements may be wrong. Or some problems are distorting the observation of other problems.

I find that armchair debugging is often the thing that actually works. Part of that process consists not of acquiring more observations, but discarding some.

Systems with simple problems are usually quickly fixed. I have two products now that have problems sufficiently complex that nobody can explain them. The fix will be to do board spins that will probably shuffle things enough that the problems go away.

The supply of accessable fossil fuels is certainly finite; it took billions of years to create that stuff within mining and drilling range of the surface, and we'll use up most of that in a few hundred years. We have time to develop fusion or whatever. Fossil fuels are bootstrapping us into the future.

What amazes me is that it would be reasonable for Earth to be a ball of uninteresting uniform basalt. But we have segregated clumps of iron, copper, gold, salt, aluminum, coal, oil, gas, rare earths, all that cool stuff pre-processed for us. Not to mention water and oxygen.

It's almost like it was planned. Maybe it was.

That's because you're the designer. It works in physics too, at least for God. ;)

Yikes.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Well, I'm an engineer. I don't have to understand it, I just need to fix it.

Close enough. Scaling of the hydrogen atom solutions to different masses is used all over in physics, besides atomic physics you have shallow donors/ accepttors in semi-conductors, excitons in same. (And I'm sure many others.)

George H.

Coal is dirty, wood is even dirtier. I burn wood. Well less than before, now just an indoor fireplace, weekends and holidays. I made it ~air tight. A little hot-spot is nice in the winter.

George H.