Ken Wilson
Thank you for your contributions.
I have fond memories of Ann Arbor seem to recall the appropriate greeting is Go Blue!
Fascinating how accurately you pegged the war culture behaviors that emerged so immediately and spectacularly in the thread among those of a certain generation.
I’ll take that as evidence you have more interesting things to say.
That’s pretty much they highest praise I offer a person, short of remarking that their scientific reasoning appears valid.
JCH. You are correct. I found the URL. We will have to wait until 2014 to know whether Smith et al have made a correct forecast.
Noelene | October 28, 2011 at 10:52 pm | Reply
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… Keep your head down,he may react to our posts,he may ignore us,if he reacts,it will be cutting,but it can only be cutting if you allow it to be.
Indeed, keep your head down, for I am Willis the Merciless, and you should hope that my all-seeing eye passes over you and skewers some other hapless victim …
Really? I think you’re taking this a bit too seriously, Noelene.
I think your belief in an invisible being from another dimension that occasionally grants your wishes is a superstition well past its use-by date.
My question to you, and to the others is … so what? Has no one ever mentioned to you that some people think it’s a superstition? Is it a social faux pas to mention that?
Indeed, why is the whole roomful of people so upset, when all that has happened is that a guy on the web has said that what they believe is an outdated superstition?
Like I said … the type of folks that believe in various invisible beings from another dimension tend to be a touchy crew, willing to do me verbal violence for suggesting their beliefs might make them prone to violence …
Dang, I thought you guys were Christians, what’s with the abuse? What ever happened to “love your enemies, it’ll drive them nuts”? I believe that, and I’m not a Christian …
w.
Major Tom, you write “Well and good – except for that fact that all forecasts are based on models that, by definition, cannot have been validated.”
Wrong. Short term forecasts CAN be validated. We will know if in a few months whether the forecast correct. It is the long term forecasts that can only be validated when we have the actual data on which to validate them. So, if you are making a 30 year forecast, we will have to wait 30 years until we know is the forecast is valid.
P.E.
You say:
“The truth is, Christian Europe came within a couple of spears of being completely extinguished by the Muslims. And despite all the propaganda from CAIR, that would have meant no Renascence, and no science as we know it.
You heard me; science as we know is was a Judeo-Christian invention”
I think that’s highly debatable. One of the roots of the Renaissance was Europe’s rediscovery of mathematics and science, which had laid dormant in Europe for centuries, while they thrived in the Muslim world. They gave us algebra, and the numerals that we use, for a start.
From good old Wikipedia:
“In the 12th century, European scholars traveled to Spain and Sicily seeking scientific Arabic texts, including al-Khwārizmī’s The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, translated into Latin by Robert of Chester, and the complete text of Euclid’s Elements, translated in various versions by Adelard of Bath, Herman of Carinthia, and Gerard of Cremona.[98][99]
These new sources sparked a renewal of mathematics. Fibonacci, writing in the Liber Abaci, in 1202 and updated in 1254, produced the first significant mathematics in Europe since the time of Eratosthenes, a gap of more than a thousand years. The work introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe, and discussed many other mathematical problems.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
Willis
You talk sense. Don`t ever be discouraged (not that you would) by the volume of opposing views. There are too few plain speaking folk about and more than enough obfuscation in science without the cloudiness of one sort or another of “toothfairyism”.
Well done! Keep it up…
and thanks
Dave G
I’m with Willis E on this one.
If I told you that I thought Grimm’s Fairy Tales were true, you’d probably laugh, or recommend that I seek help.
But some of the stories that Christians believe are equally daft. They tend not to strike us as odd because we are so familiar with them. Worshipping statues of someone being slowly tortured to death on a piece of wood seems pretty normal to us because we’re so used to it. The idea that some bloke’s painful death helps us in some sort of metaphysical fashion doesn’t strike us as being grotesque (or barmy), because it’s a common idea in the society that we have grown up in.
It’s a real puzzle to me why so many Americans are so religious.
Judith,
Well, given that I was working on the reply to my uncertainty monster paper, where the IPCC grand poobahs were telling me that they did it right in AR4 and they had natural variability figured out, I was rather surprised to see these comments, especially since one of the persons quoted was a coauthor of the reply criticizing the attribution arguments in my uncertainty monster paper. Juvenile point scoring? I don’t think so. Lets try exposing overconfidence, and in this particular case, hypocrisy.
I think you should not use an article composed by somebody else for a different purpose as a source for judging third parties. Paul Voosen has chosen some excepts to his article to serve the needs of that article. You may have your justified prejudices of the people, but you cannot use this article as additional evidence for them. It’s too indirect. Going one step further and using Pielke’s selections is still worse.
Willis – you agreed with Bob K on this:
What you have identified is not something specific to a belief system, but something that is inherent to the social behavior of human beings.
However, that pretty much invalidates your idea that religion would be the cause of hateful behavior by people against people.
If there hadn’t been religion, or communism, or the Tamerlane’s dreams of conquest, or Hitler’s Lebensraum, or Nero’s sadistic pleasures, or or or…well, humans would have found some other reason to kill each other. Agreed?
ps Alcohol is another “cause” of a great number of deaths. Would you seriously write tirades against C2H5OH?
Other Bart
Here two Barts begin to converge.
Have some past treatments on both sides been underwhelming? Including sophomoric approaches to key questions?
Absolutely.
And it is proper to be skeptical of such inadequacies where pertinent.
However, there is plenty of valid reasoning and plausible evidence too for the pieces of the puzzle that can be put together.
Those pieces in collection, the partial picture they form, suffice to move the state of our knowledge from ignorance to sufficient to recognize there have been changes, and to have some sense of the probable shape of those changes.
Perhaps there is, somewhere out there I am unaware of, a clearer compilation of the body of knowledge of climate including most or all of what you ask.
If so, it’s more than I need to know, though I’d like to see it in any event, pertinent or not.
Still, a complete accounting of all energy in the whole system by temperature and heat capacity of every component is a very strict demand, given there are ways to statistically affirm the results we have for the purposes we need.
Just because we can ask and answer the question of physical meaning –and ought — doesn’t mean we need to know the exact measure of it.
Science is a poor name for the field. Real knowledge exists only in fiction. “Aestimo” (reckoning) is a better word for it.
He’s good, but not this good:
Brad
I agree it is a stretch from current process on the topic, but it might work.
The Gov. would not care how a developer got their model to work, only if they worked. The request for proposal if issued today might ask for a model that could predict beginning in 2013. At least it would be transparent on what the models were designed to predict, with what level of accuracy over what timeframe.
Odd that when you simplify Harry’s argument in order to make it more understandable, with the actual numbers in the two arguments being identical when you work them out, Harry can no longer recognize it as his own argument.
Vaughan, as an educator you are certainly aware of a corollary:
It is always harder to evaluate a wildly incorrect solution to a homework problem than it is to grade something that another student has some sort of grasp on. In the former case, you often have to be a mind-reader.
At least on his own…
You should not have mentioned Pakistan.
Every particular place has problems. The same thinking applies, in my opinion, to California, which is sacrificing its already existing water control system to a greening of its electrical supply.
the U.S. has in fact helped in flood relief in Pakistan, Thailand and Burma. AGW proponents actually propose enormous investments that would divert money from flood control, if enacted. My question is, if you believe in AGW, is that ethical, if you accept Hansen’s “grandchildren” argument?
Thanks for the hilarious clarification!!
curryja | November 6, 2011 at 5:46 pm |
Willis, see this link: http://www.noaa.gov/climate.html
Everything Karl was talking about in his talk was really related to NOAA climate services
Nope. I’m not buying that at all. I want a definition of “climate services”, not Tom Karl’s claim that a forecast three months out for this winter’s weather is a “climate service”. It’s not, that’s a medium-range forecast.
That’s weather, Judith. Climate in general is defined as the average of the weather over some sufficiently long period of time … and that’s not this winter’s weather.
Now, I’m sure that Tom Karl would love to have “climate services” become a term of art, as if there were actually some such “climate service” which is more than what used to be called a “long-range weather forecast”.
But as near as I can tell, NOAA doesn’t offer any “climate services”. What NOAA is providing is WEATHER SERVICES. I don’t mind them doing that. I do mind them flat-out lying about what it is that they are doing.
In short, Judith … what do YOU mean when you use the term?
Please give us YOUR clear, unambiguous, bright-line definition that distinguishes climate services from a guess at this winter’s weather … because according to your link, what Tom Karl is flogging is just a PR stunt, and I assume that you know that.
w.
*shrug*
Strictly speaking, every physical change is an energy change. I’m not particularly interested in expressing these changes in units of Watts or Joules or degrees of temperature.
Indeed, those units are fairly difficult to work with at the level of policy, of evaluating the big picture questions, for anyone except an engineer, and engineers are typically overwhelmed by such technical detail so much they often miss big pictures.
I remember an engineer trying to explain once why he missed that his calculations indicated the SUV he was responsible for the design of would have triple the average rollover casualty rate of vehicles in its class. He said, when forced to acknowledge, it never occured to him the unit of measure of his calculation was a proxy for “dead babies”.
To show CO2 levels affect climate, I could use an engineering approach, sure.
Others have.
If you’re truly ignorant of the work done on absorbtivity and energy balance calculations and truly doubt the validity of multidecadal comparisons, nothing I say now will dislodge that entrenched refusal to see.
As to questions of policy, I’m satisfied CO2 levels are rising (aren’t you?), temperatures are rising (aren’t you?), the effects on weather of higher temperatures are happening (aren’t you?), and the complete logical chain from prime mover to effect has been demonstrated by reliable evidence (aren’t you?), that contrary claims of benefit are overblown and unreliable and not really pertinent (aren’t you?), and the Uncertainty is both small enough and asymmetrical in the direction of harms enough (aren’t you?), by enough to state current American policy is just plain in error (aren’t you?).
Knowing is fine. Doing something is what matters.
