Quantcast
Channel: Comments for Climate Etc.
Viewing all 147818 articles
Browse latest View live

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by plazaeme

0
0

You have a pretty key issue here, related to public debate and information.

Lawyers can be one-sided in courtroom because the “other side” will have the same means to present their case. Scientists are encouraged to become activist-scientists because of thermaggedon. But, most of the media think there is no need to present both sides of the controversy. So, you get a mixture of systems with the perfect strategy to avoid any critical thinking.


Comment on Back from the twitter twilight zone: Responses to my WSJ op-ed by steven

0
0

I hope she didn’t try the Pekingnese duck.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by aaron

0
0

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by curryja

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Eric

0
0

“Skeptics” spend a lot of whining about the world not being fair to them.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Mike Flynn

0
0

AFOMD,

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I fear it is you, not DocMartyn, who asserts with amazing ignorance. With typical Warmist arrogance, you imply that DDT, as well as insecticides such as dieldrin etc., are flouro-chloro insecticides. They are not. To describe them as such merely indicates the amazing ability of Warmists to substitute fantasy for fact, with a straight face.

DDT is commonly described as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which unsurprisingly contains no reference to flourine at all. Maybe you confuse chlorine with flourine. They do sound similar, and do share some letters. Possibly Warmists find chemistry a little difficult.

Are you really stupid, or does your hubris prevent you from discriminating between fact and fiction?

The world has given up wondering. It is certain.

Live well and prosper,

Mike Flynn.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Eric

0
0

So the more that is learned about the past, the more certain the hockeystick becomes. Interesting.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Peter Lang

0
0

I just received this response from a close friend (lives in Qld):

I assume you are thinking of a chart with Year on the X-axis, Net Cost/Benefit on the Y-axis, with the various percentile lines defined by the proportion of a large number of observations.
This is fine for Dimson because he has lots of observations. For Costs of climate change, however, we have none.
Sure, you can run the model, say, a thousand times with each of the inputs randomly varied across an assumed distribution, but this is just adding many assumptions to a model already chockful of dubious assumptions. It ends up like Alice in Wonderland trying to count angels dancing on a pin head. And this is just part of your point 3.a. below!
Having said that, most of the issues you raise are unknown relationships, e.g. probability that a policy will deliver a certain level of cost-benefit. That, of course, is not a reason to not examine the impact of interacting relationships, even if the PDF’s of the relationships have to be assumed.
The difficulty is developing a conceptual framework. For instance, you could start with a simple model which has the relationships as inputs, and Monte Carlo modelling will give you an overall PDF. In this case, relationships are in parallel and things are simple. Usually, however, a framework will have relationships in series and then it gets really difficult because the output of one relationship affects the PDF of the next. It is not too bad if the relationships are binary (e.g, 30% chance of A and 70% chance of B), but very difficult when you have a continuous PDF.
Frankly, IMO it is an insoluble problem. But I’d be interested in any bright ideas you have. You might start with a block diagram, or flow diagram, linking the relationships. And sketching a hypothetical PDF for relationships a. to d. would be good, along with a sample chart for 1. and 4.


Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Peter Lang

0
0

I have two responses:

1. If we can’t estimate the probabilities that a policy will deliver the projected benefits, how can it be justified?

2. My purpose is to get policy proponents to focus on the probability that their policy will deliver what they claim. If we could get people to focus on the probability of success, perhaps we could “cut the emissions of twaddle” (to quote David MacKay, UK chief science adviser to DECC and author of “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Eric

0
0

Dr. Curry, how does the Bud Ward article support your take away from it? The article had nothing to do with what you claim it does. Nowhere does the article talk about denier witch hunts or loss of confidence in science.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by tonyb

0
0

Peter Lang

I will be circumspect here as I don’t want to trigger moderation with too many links

If you go to my article here

http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-sea-levels-part-1-from-the-holocene-to-romans/

You will see in the 4th paragraph I mention it is ‘part of a ‘longer “document’ If you click on ‘document’ and scroll to the bottom of the extended version you will come to this reference and graphic

—— ——-
“A further study uses the same information and is headed; “Reconstructing sea level from paleo and projected temperatures 200 to 2100 AD”

This rather apocalyptic version-as do the other variations- starts towards the end of our studied period, but the margins of error show the high levels in earlier Roman times, then a dip, then a rise to the MWP peak, a decline, then a rise in modern times to below that of Roman and MWP before a dramatic projected increase closely linked to the future
temperature increase expected by some researchers.

http://www.glaciology.net/Home/PDFs/Announcements/gslprojection

——- ——-

It appears that sea level oscillates some 20/40cm around a mean average.

As regards glacier movements you will see my graphic here

It shows glacier advances and retreats over the last 3000 years from observational evidence compiled by such as Ladurie.

Clearly there has been major advances and retreats, which in theory should correspond roughly with sea level changes. (I haven’t done the full research on Parts 2 and 3 of ‘Historic variations in sea levels’ yet, so this assumption might be incorrect)

During Roman times it is said that many of the high level Alpine glaciers disappeared. At this point dear old Max would chime in with accounts of how high level silver mines near his home in Switzerland are still buried under ice.

As I say, there are enormous complications by trying to look so far back in time as the paper you referenced and trying to attribute global changes is further complicated by land changes as it sinks or rises.

So, I don’t believe this constancy of sea levels until the last 150 years. Neither observational evidence nor borehole data supports this. There appears to have been high water stands around the 5th Century, around the 12th and 16th Century and in between the levels have been altering substantially.

The LIA was supposed to have been the coldest part of the Holocene for 8000 years or so and would have deposited vast amounts of snow and ice which has been melting for some 300 years.

I have never seen estimates as to how much water was locked up during this period but if it was unprecedented in thousands of years there is theoretically a lot of melt to come which could cause sea levels to rise above the MWP levels

Water drawn from aquifers is another wild card

tonyb

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by DocMartyn

0
0
"DocMartun asserts<b> [with amazing ignorance]</b> “I am not aware of any fluoro-chloro organic pesticides in use” Even <b>DDT</b> is still in wide use globally, DocMartyn! Not to mention the “dirty gang” that additionally includes<b> dicofol, heptachlor, endosulfan, chlordane, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, mirex, kepone and pentachlorophenol</b>." Those are all organochlorines, none of them are fluoro-chloro organic pesticides; the lack of fluorine in their structures is a bit of a clue. DDT is very useful in indoor applications, and even Malarial vectors that are DDT resistant avoid surfaces treated with DDT. 630,000 people die from Malaria annually, mostly under-5. Pesticides are the cheapest, most effective first line of defense.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2

0
0

Would that include Hubers and Knutti’s new rcp8.5, C&W with new and improved Aerosols/Solar 1.8 TRC/3.0 ECS paper?

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Michael

0
0

Tom Fuller | October 21, 2014 at 8:53 pm |

Tom, that was a long-winded evasion of Joshua’s point.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Rob Ellison

0
0

In any case, while his form for the Hamiltonian of the dynamical system is standard, his derivation of a thermodynamical equilibrium state is quite non-stadard (sic)and, as I said, conflicts with the second law of thermodynamics.

He actually accused me of misrepresenting the paper by quoting it. Didn’t recognise the passage and denied that it was what the paper was about. Nor does he understand the Hamiltonian – which is a vector field defining a flow on the symplectic manifold. How’s that for jargon? The latter emerging necessarily from the Hamiltonian as a real valued differentiable function. The paper under discussion deals with an extension of thermodynamics into a flow field.

‘Hydrodynamics is a theory of continuous distributions of matter, described in the
simplest case by two fields or distributions: a density field and a velocity field, both defined
over R3 or a portion thereof. The role of temperature is often constrained, as it is
taken to be determined by the density and the pressure. Classical thermodynamics, on the
other hand, is the study of states of equilibrium, with uniform density and temperature, and relations between such states. In this context, extremum principles first formulated by Gibbs (1878) play an important role; see for example Callen (1960), but the extension of thermodynamics to systems in which the dynamical variables are fields on R3 is not immediate and in fact variational principles are seldom invoked in studies of such systems.’ op. cit.

But what does P-N actually say? That a math he doesn’t seem to understand is wrong because he says so? That for some unspecified reason it violates the second law?

The argument was resolved more than a hundred years ago, in 1896, when Loschmidt himself acknowledged that Maxwell and Bolzmann were right after all. But some people will never give up on the idea of a working perpetual motion machine and the dream of infinite free energy. No single negative experimental result will ever convince them.

Kelvin himself questioned what he called the Maxwell-Boltzmann doctrine – especially for an isolated system. But it is not about rants on perpetual motion – the perpetuum mobile anti-science stupidity of such as myself or claims of authority – no matter what the authority is. It is about the math which changes when a gravity effect is added.

P-N – as well as FOMBS – is clearly feigning an expertise he is far from possessing. Using verbiage to pretend to knowledge without having any substance. Always ready to launch into the anti-science tirades that they so depend on – and which are so misguided. As I say – it reminds me of Feynman for some reason. Only with a dimension of righteous indignation added to the overweening arrogance and ignorance.

“There were lot of fools at the conference – pompous fools – and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them and try to help them out. But pompous fools – guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is alright. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”


Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Rob Ellison

0
0

It goes to the question of credibility – they have very little.

Comment on Back from the twitter twilight zone: Responses to my WSJ op-ed by Michael

0
0

“You already know that for ages 65 and over the efficacy is ~ 9% which is basically insignificant, why would you think it would be ~60% for ages 55 to 65? ” -capn

You keep repeating this but it’s not true – it was the result for one particularly strain, one year.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by steven

0
0

Tony makes a good point about aquifers but even without that you are looking at reconstructions that have resolutions of 15-20 cm and >200 years. I don’t see how much is going to be able to be made of this study in regards to showing the modern era is unusual.

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Eric

0
0

Dr. Curry and Bud Ward have very little?

Comment on Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty by Richard Case

0
0

Michael said “… it’s quite obvious, ‘deniers’ have had their views covered in the media far out of proportion to the extent that those views occur within the scientific community…”

Are you serious? Honest to God, is there a day that goes by without the media quoting some hare-brained study where “Global Warming causes X” ? – where X is anything from cow infertility to increases in crime to deaths of moose in Minnesota to increased acne. The press will joyfully report on any such claim – so long as there is a so-called “researcher” who supposedly looked into the matter. Here’s a site that documents all the published claims… http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm . And another here: http://cuttingthroughthefog.blogspot.com/2014/06/ridiculous-climate-change-claims.html .

So yeah… the media are SO much more disproportionate in their coverage of skeptics over warmists. Get real.

Viewing all 147818 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images