Yes, let’s just all stop making predictions and let what happens surprise us instead. Good plan.
Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by Jim D
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Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by P.E.
Because all those people who saw the housing crackup coming did us so much good, huh?
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Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by Don Monfort
You can make all the predictions you want jimmy. You can even pretend they will very likely match the future reality. But it ain’t getting you any closer to your goal of screwing up the world’s economy.
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Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by Captain Dallas (Fish Beware!)
http://compare.ebay.com/like/310321940060?var=lv<yp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar&_lwgsi=y
I was think about that but opted for the Elvis toaster instead.
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Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by P.E.
When I was a kid I used to wonder about what kind of an active imagination it took to see goats and lions and bears in a half dozen start. The constellations never made any sense to me.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Feynman quotes: “I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.”
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Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by P.E.
*stars
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Comment on Another IPCC error: cloud albedo forcing by Philip
Richard,
There is no conspiracy. The IPCC tries to construct a plausible scientific story that supports the idea of anthropogenic warming, and in part this requires the diminishment of the role of natural variations. The thing that truly puzzles me, is why the IPPC believes it is so important to build such a story, when in fact it is irrelevant. CO2 is a GHE and therefore rising emission levels need to be addressed; the scientific questions will be resolved by building a better understanding of natural variability.
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Comment on Hegerl et al. react to the Uncertainty Monster paper by tempterrain
Max,
What might “sound quite reasonable” to you is neither here nor there.
There’s no hypothesising what Judith has said. You obviously didn’t notice that my post consisted of 8 questions. You can know that a sentence is a question when you see this punctuation mark “?” !
However, I may have been able to provoke Judith into into answering your question but not mine. Despite what she says about building bridges, coming down from the ivory tower etc, she isn’t interested in answering too many questions.
Judith can’t create an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty by doing that.
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Comment on Hegerl et al. react to the Uncertainty Monster paper by tempterrain
Judith saying that there it is very likely that more than 30% of the warming is due to anthropogenic GHG concentrations is rather like an economist saying that it is very likely that the US national debt is more than $3 trillion.
Its actually about $15 trillion, so, of course, that statement is true but it gives quite the wrong impression.
Judith is careful to only say things that on this blog that give a certain impression without them actually being untrue. She’s probably slipped up a few times in this regard, and when she does it no doubt causes her some embarrassment with her more straightforward colleagues who are happy to walk on only one side of the street.
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Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by steven mosher
F=MA is a model.
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Comment on Hegerl et al. react to the Uncertainty Monster paper by tempterrain
AJStrata,
Good point about “Consider the quality of uncertainty required to KNOW how long you have from detecting a problem …….. Think about the trade here (lives on the ground versus the lives of the crew).”
Similarly, we should consider how long we have from detecting a problem with the atmosphere to being able to fix it. In a sense, we, and our descendants, are all the crew and lives are at stake. A good engineer will always give safety the highest priority.
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Comment on Hegerl et al. react to the Uncertainty Monster paper by lurker
tt,
“hide the decline” means “fudge the data” and you can dance around that until the Arctic refreezes, but it is what it is.
“The team”, are, as they like to point out, the smartest guys in the room. They did not simply use that- and so many other- terms as a result of poor word choice,and they are not just ‘boys being boys’.
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Comment on Week in Review 12/16/11 by Captain Dallas (Fish Beware!)
Bob said, “I meant the post 1950 cooling being due to anthropogenic aerosols rather than volcanic.”
That is what I fine hard to accept, that post 1950 aerosols would cause the cooling until circa 1979. The buildup to WWII was probably the most massively pollutant intensive time in history. The dip in temperature from 1940 to 1950 I could easily see as industrial aerosols and war related. From 1950 to 1980 man must have struck an amazing balance with nature.
The once more into the fray appears to be arm waving considering the more recent discussions on the difference between projection and observation. They seem to be spending more time questioning the accuracy of the satellites and ARGO than their models.
I don’t have a problem with models. I do have a problem with the group modeling where the same poor estimate can be transferred to others and reliance on the same types of models and ensembles when there are others, like energy models, being neglected. Models provide estimates and where the observations vary from estimates that is the information. They seem to be getting bigger hammers instead of questioning the anomalies objectively.
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Comment on Hegerl et al. react to the Uncertainty Monster paper by Don Monfort
“Similarly, we should consider how long we have from detecting a problem with the atmosphere to being able to fix it. In a sense, we, and our descendants, are all the crew and lives are at stake. A good engineer will always give safety the highest priority.”
Nobody has suggested neglecting that. The discussion is on how to do that with sound science, with accountability, and tracibility , and without nature tricks, so that trillions of our’s and our children’s money are not wasted on foolishness.
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Comment on Hegerl et al. react to the Uncertainty Monster paper by Don Monfort
Another silly analogy from the Judith haters. We know what the national debt, to the penny. Not hard to make a statement on that with high level of confidence. Try something else.
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Comment on A biologist’s perspective on ice ages and climate sensitivity: Part I by WebHubTelescope
I don’t apologize to Thomas Gold for his stupid theory on abiotic oil. To understand why people believe weird things, you have to confront the mentality of those scientists with the seeming highest credentials. Gold enjoyed being a contrarian, and with his refined British accent while teaching at Cornell all those years, he got away with being a charlatan. His is a very interesting story made relevant to this post by his theories on dust.
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Comment on A biologist’s perspective on ice ages and climate sensitivity: Part I by Coldish
Herman: the primary evidence is the correspondence between summer insolation in the northern hemisphere (as calculated from the Milankovich cycles) and the oxygen isotope record from deep-sea sediment (which is thought to reflect ice volume). There is also a reasonably good correspondence between the Vostok isotope data and the deep sea record, at least back to 125 ka or so.
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Comment on A biologist’s perspective on ice ages and climate sensitivity: Part I by Coldish
LeftTurn and David: Milankovich-type cycles must indeed be as old as the earth, but the further back one goes in time the more uncertainty creeps into the calculations. There is after all some error in all the measurements. AFAIK beyond a few million years we have little idea of the actual Milankovich-type pattern.
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Comment on A better climate for disaster risk management by Steve Milesworthy
This seems to be looking for a moral justification for persuading the rich countries to pay for adaptation in poorer countries. But in practice, for many projects the distinction between the risks of AGW and normal variability may be hard to call.
A rich country might say that mitigation against natural disasters is part and parcel of normal development. For example, if you build on a flood plain, or draw too much water from a river, it might be argued that you deserve what you get, and that any country including poorer countries should consider the risks more carefully as they develop their infrastructure.
Arguably, though, if an event may be attributed or partly attributed to a *change* in climate that could not be anticipated, then the case for subsidising the “adaptation” to it is stronger, even if the vulnerability already existed prior to the change in climate.
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Comment on A better climate for disaster risk management by Steve Milesworthy
“Climate information that can be acted upon is best created in dialogue between the users and providers, and partnerships between climate scientists and disaster risk managers should promote knowledge sharing, trust, and the development of innovative solutions.”
While this may be stating the b***din’ obvious, what does one do when the “user” group do not have any “disaster risk managers” amongst them. Representatives of local people in a given country or region may have local expertise in potential risks, but that doesn’t really turn them into a “risk manager”.
In creating the dialogue, then, there may initially be a tension between assessing real risk (that determined by careful calculation of the odds of certain events) and perceived risks (that determined, perhaps, by which particular 100-year events have happened within the past 10 years, or which events have particularly impacted the local representative’s family or ethnic group).
The problem comes if, in creating this dialogue, any mistakes made, say choosing the wrong local people, highlighting a risk that is not a real risk and so forth, can be used to criticise the whole process (“such and such person from Elbonia was not selected based on their expertise, but for reasons of political correctness” etc.)
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