snow!

I have one of Iron and one of clay.

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They have a statistical expectation - too much rain, too little rain, unexpected freezes, and hail-storms just before harvest are all relatively infrequent events. If they lose a harvest more often than - say - once per decade, they'll sell up nd move out.

Farmers don't just know the long term average - the mean of the distribution. They also have a good idea of the standard deviation of the relevant parameters, which is to say that they are aware of the risk that they will lose any particular crop in any particular year. That determines how much food they try to keep in store as a buffer against bad years.

Thye can't predict when they are going to need that buffer, but they have a pretty good idea of how often they are going to need it.

The depressing point about anthropogenic global warming is that all this accumulated knowledge is going to be irrelevant history in a couple more decades (if we keep on burning fossil carbon at the current rate and faster).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Because both weather and climate models are crap.

but they

I think you enjoy depressing things.

John

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Not actually true. Weather models are actually pretty good, but the behaviour they are modelling is sensitive to intial conditions, which menas that they don't predict more than about ten days in advance.

Climate models don't have this problem, but they model long term averages, which isn't much help in predicting ocsional bouts of extreme weather.

You describe both models as "crap" because they don't produce the kind of predictions that you feel they should. If you were asking useful questions - like whether farming is going to be worth the effort in California thirty years from now - the climte models would look somewhat better.

As usual, you are engaged in shooting the messenger. I find anthropogenic global warming deeply depressing, albeit not as depressing as the reactions of people who want to take refuge from the facts by going into denial.

Read Jahred Diamond's "Collapse" and see if you can recognise yourself in the leaders of the collapsing societies, who kept on playing their status games while their society collapsed around them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Long term averages are easy to generate. Just average the last 20 years to predict the next 20.

Like, useful ones? Ones correlated to reality?

If you were asking useful

Start making sense one of these days, please.

The climate models tell us nothing real about farming in California thirty years from now. But there is no way that farming in California will be any less than a multi-billion dollar cash cow, as it is now. World demand for food is going nowhere but up, and billions of people are surviving from crops grown on degrading land, above shrinking water tables. California will do fine. If the water supply drops, we might have to back off on water-hog crops like cotton and rice.

I'm not a "leader in society", and you're not either. I design circuits, and you do nothing.

John

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If you aren't messing up the planet by injecting extra CO2 into the atmosphere.

Weather models are closely correlated with reality, but the reality is inconveniently sensitive to initial conditions. The models are fine - it's reality that is crap.

Climate models are expected to be more useful, but their predictions of change take a few decades to get outside the noise. You want instant predictions of day-to-day weather a decade in advance, and throw your rattle out of the cot when you can't have it.

Learn something one of these days, please. We know that we are fooling around with the climate. The one degree Kelvin rise we've had over the last century hasn't been big enough to make much difference to the way weather systems travel around the globe, though the rather more dramatic warming around the Arctic circle may have been enough to start having a perceptible effect - search on "Barents and Kara Seas" for one speculation

If this kind of shift in regular weather pattern is duplicated elsewhere - as is expected by climate modellers - areas that are useful for farming at the moment won't be useful in the none-too- distant future.

This depends on the way the average rainfall on the watersheds changes as global warming progresses. You might need to set up nuclear-fusion- powered desalination plants to produce the fresh water that farming in California happens to require. It would probably be cheaper to shut down the state and move everybody off to someplace that does have enough water.

We hoe they will be able to continue to do so.

You don't trust climate models but you do trust your private crystal ball?

And it if drops even more, you might have to give up supporting a population of human beings who drink water from time to time.

You are well off and you own a company that seems to do well. You buy books whose sole aim seems to be flattering rich Republicans, though you claim that you aren't a Republican. If you were persuaded of the reality of global warming, your opinion would influence others.

and run a company that makes money out of selling the circuits that you - and other people - design.

Not at the moment. I'm retired, whether I like it or not. When I was younger I was designing slightly more high-tech stuff than you do now. This is irrelevant to the reliability of our various opinions on the reality of anthropogenic global warming - I at least have the time and the inclination to read a bit about the subject, while you get your - silly - opinions pre-packaged from the right-wing media that you seem to like to read.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You have finally said something memorable.

John

Now we wait for the real miracle - for you to remember it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Nah, just that it's "crap."

And _I'm_ the one with cognitive difficulties! Well, according to your asinine ad hominem attack.

Thanks, Rich

You are flattering yourself. An attack on you, Rich isn't ad hominem. It's ad subhominem.

And your cognitive difficulties have lead you discard the points I made with an unmarked snip, rather than trying to make a reasoned response.

Like I said, you are trumpeting the fact that you can't think straight.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Geez, what a repulsive, pompous fathead you are. I'm sure glad you don't design electronics.

John

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I wonder what John Larkin thinks he is saying here. Rich does say remarkably stupid things - but then so does John, so perhaps I'm supposed to ignore Rich being stupid in the same way that John would like me to ignore him being stupid.

We then get the weird side-step into electronic design. Why would John be happy that I'm not designing electronics at the moment? Is he afraid that if I were, I'd be designing better electronics than he does? A couple of my ideas have ended up in patents, which is not something that he claims, so maybe he has reason to be nervous.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

This is an electronic design group, you moron.

Why would John

Because you'd obviously be so bad at it. Because you aren't willing to think. And because you'd treat your customers like you treat everyone else. Hey, I have no need to worry about any of that.

Is he

I have one patent, and the rights to use it in any venue except atom probing. I didn't seek to get the idea patented and I haven't made a nickel on it. How much have your patents made for you?

But the idea of your designs threatening me is absurd from all sorts of directions, beginning with the fact that you don't design things and probably never will. You are too busy with global warming and insults and educating your palate or whatever.

You are a moron who thinks that you're smart. I bet your palate is a moron too.

John

One might not realize it from your postings on climate threads, as well as some others. You might try acting like a leader, since you see yourself that way.

Jon

I probably post 1% as much about climate as Sloman does. And I do post a lot about electronics, which he doesn't.

There are all sorts of interesting technical threads that he doesn't participate in. He's an over-educated moron, and nasty to boot.

I see myself as a circuit designer. All I want to lead is electrons.

John

I wasn't saying you shouldn't post on climate. I'm fine if you want to do that.

Just that you should stop saying "this is an electronic design group" every time you don't like some climate post, unless you start leading and stop following up on such posts. Hypocrisy is never pretty.

Post on climate and stop pretending to some higher ground you aren't haven't got; or else stop posting on climate and take the higher ground. Be honest to yourself, at least.

Jon

Hypocrisy is John Larkin's middle name ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Boredom is worse. Sloman, and others, pour out tens of thousands of lines of climate drivel, with ritual insults appended. Why don't they take their nonsense to some newsgroup where it's on-topic? Because they might look like amateurs there?

So post some electronics.

The interesting thing, to me, about AGW is the simulation aspect. I think such simulations are likely useless now, and may always be useless. Sloman and others think they are accurate, actually more accurate than reality, somehow. Simulation, its validity or not *is* importent to electronic design.

The other interesting thing about AGW is how it parallels with so many other "scientific" orthodoxies that turned out to be wrong. That's more common than not in fields where theory can't be backed up by experiment.

The latest "global warming causes cold" thing is hilarious. I wonder if any simulations predicted this before it actually happened. Simulation that is continuously hacked to keep up with reality is just curve fitting.

John