The Myth of Academic Neutrality (Climategate)

[stokedporcupine8]

[quote]tom63 wrote:

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Well, don’cha know, while they would find it horribly unfair and unreasonable for the government to say that they must give a prediction for next year’s temperatures and if the prediction is wrong, their funding will be eliminated, it is completely reasonable for us to bear costs of trillions of dollars on account of the predictions some (by no means all) climate scientists have for 40 years out.[/quote]

Yep. Sounds about right.[/quote]

While Bill’s criticisms are not without substance, this still sounds a bit simplistic to me. While it seems odd that you can’t give accurate short term predictions but can give accurate long term predictions, it’s not hard to imagine why. The two sorts of predictions are dependent on different variables. Short term predictions require knowing all sorts of precise factors, while long term trends (according to geological records) seem to be fairly correlated to only a few easy to measure variables. To blindly assume that being able to predict one allows you to predict the other is to miss how the predictions are made.

There are, actually, other examples in both science and economics of such predictive disparity. In economics, I believe, it’s virtually impossible to predict the spending habits of one individual, but possible to predict the spending habits of larger groups. Likewise in quantum mechanics, it is impossible (literally) to predict the position of a single electron or other quantum particle, but very easy to make predictions about large groups of them.

While the quantum mechanics example is weak, and the economics example possibly not quite correct, the point is to illustrate how changing the domain (time scale, quantity of people, size of object) of a certain prediction (temperature, spending habits, position) effects the sort of prediction being made. Different predictions are made based on different variables, and, prima facie, the disparity between climatologists predictions of the whether tomorrow and 100 years from now does not make it less scientific. Of course, since there has been yet no experimental confirmation of their 100 year predictions there’s not much positive to say in their defense. I suppose only time will tell, but as one poster already said, the risks of getting it wrong are so, so high.

[Headhunter]

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

You’re doing it again. You’re assuming that a dynamic system full of millions of highly-intelligent beings can be regulated (‘curving’). It can’t be done.

You think government regulation is going to solve anything? The only thing governments are really good at is killing people in wars.

Since the many examples I gave aren’t making the point, how about the movie ‘Jurassic Park’? What happened when people tried to regulate a tiny island full of dumb animals? The animals decided they didn’t want to be regulated and began eating the guests instead.

The only solution to manmade GW, if it exists, is freedom.

[/quote]

I’m not assuming that millions of highly intelligent beings can be regulated, I’m assuming that to a reasonable extent it is possible to regulate the major manufacturing centers of the country with regard to environmental damage. Clearly the sort of regulation that would be involved in “curving” man-made global warming is feasible, since it’s already in place! What do you think automobile emission laws are in the US? Are you really going to tell me that automobile emission laws haven’t curved… automobile emission laws?

The sorts of examples you are bringing up are examples of total economic regulation. Since we’re not talking about that, I’ll say again that I have no idea what the failure of the Soviet Union to run a planned economy and personally hand bread out to each of its citizens has to be with the ability of the United States or China to enact emission standards? Oh yeah, nothing.

And please, since you’re into examples, how about some examples of how those “highly intelligent” beings have used their “freedom” to the betterment of themselves and others? You know, how millions of Americans, for example, are freely choosing to eat themselves to death at McDonalds. How about how millions of Americans have freely chosen to use their economic power to spend themselves into 100%+ debt? Or what about those Americans who freely chose to purchase half million dollar homes while making 50k a year? The point here is not that people need to be told by the government how to run their lives, but that if people aren’t even able to consider their own immediate and short term benefit how do you expect all those “highly intelligent” beings to make the sort of choices that would curve carbon output? Let’s talk about those emission laws again… are you really suggesting that people, whether automobile consumers or producers, would have over the last 50 years lowered automobile emissions without government regulation? No… [/quote]

You really want to use one of the most heavily regulated industries on earth to argue for regulation? Okay. Compare autos with calculators – the price of autos has skyrocketed, while a good calculator can be had for a few dollars. The market made calculators WAAAAY cheaper. What happened to autos?

The free market cannot be beaten, only thwarted at gunpoint. And that’s eventually where any sort of ‘curving’ winds up. Simply look at the world around you and quit dreaming of fantasyland.

[Headhunter]

Someday, I hope everyone figures out that using continuous functions for discontinuous systems (like systems of living beings) is simply stupid and utopian. This view that continuous functions can do this has led to more disasters than we can imagine.

Just think of the swath of destruction from GW, the industries ruined, jobs lost, fortunes destroyed…all so Al Gore can make billions and now allows Obama to take vengeance against whitey for not ‘sharing the wealth’.

[PRCalDude]

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

While Bill’s criticisms are not without substance, this still sounds a bit simplistic to me. While it seems odd that you can’t give accurate short term predictions but can give accurate long term predictions, it’s not hard to imagine why. The two sorts of predictions are dependent on different variables. Short term predictions require knowing all sorts of precise factors, while long term trends (according to geological records) seem to be fairly correlated to only a few easy to measure variables. To blindly assume that being able to predict one allows you to predict the other is to miss how the predictions are made.
[/quote]
Do you have any evidence of this - that “long term predictions are correlated with only a few easy-to-measure variables?” Why would short-term measurements be any different? You seem to accept this based on what someone else has told you.

The fact that long term geological trends are correlated with certain variables does not mean that those variables caused the trends, rather those variables provide the most accurate data ABOUT the trends.

If what you are saying were true, scientists would have no reason to fudge the data they got from their models, right?

Just out of curiosity, how much modeling have you actually done?

There are, actually, other examples in both science and economics of such predictive disparity. In economics, I believe, it’s virtually impossible to predict the spending habits of one individual, but possible to predict the spending habits of larger groups.

How can you say this with a straight face? Back in 2006, economists were telling us the US had entered a “new paradigm” with its housing market and that prices could only go up, UP, UP! Look at us now. Only a handful predicted our current credit contraction and deflationary cycle.

I guarantee you that I could make a much more accurate model of an individual’s spending habits simply by looking at past spending habits and income and extrapolating.

[quote]
While the quantum mechanics example is weak, and the economics example possibly not quite correct, the point is to illustrate how changing the domain (time scale, quantity of people, size of object) of a certain prediction (temperature, spending habits, position) effects the sort of prediction being made. [/quote]

Completely different animal. On a quantum level, you can’t measure things without simultaneously affecting what you’re measuring. This is not true of hurricane predictions, economics, etc. I don’t affect the trajectory of a hurricane by flying into it with a C-130 in order to take data. Buoy data does not affect swell direction and fetch.

[Cortes]

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]JEATON wrote:

Did you read the actual story and check the accompanying links? The point is, where was the peer review when the numbers were being cooked. Was the incentives to this particular segment of the academic community too great for them not to skew the data? After all, if there is not a problem then “poof.” There goes the money.

[/quote]

Form the link:

The details of the science are beyond you and me. So are the details of just about everything. The world is complex and growing more complex. What we do understand is deliberate chicanery by experts with a political agenda.

This sums everything up.

The questions that skeptics should be asking is just where do we stand on climate research? In the grand scheme of climate research, how big is this? Just in what way was the data twisted? What raw data just made up? Was only some data taken into account? What exactly was wrong.

Given the well stated quote above, these are exactly the sort of questions that should be asked. Unfortunately, no questions are being asked. Instead, people are blinding assuming the worst. They are more worried about making up names like “climategate” then actually asking those questions. The right is just happy to have some reply, no some excuse, to the climate research.

In the end it might be that this all has thrown man-made global warming out the window. The point is that that’s exactly the question, and as quick as many on the left are to dismiss this the right is to jump on it. [/quote]

This post actually sums up my thinking on the matter rather well. I, for one, would certainly like to see what’s really at the bottom of all of this.

I’ve certainly felt for some time, though, that something like this was going on, and it does not feel surprising to me in the slightest. Sorry to be so, ahem, “obtuse,” but one of the things I was thinking when I typed my first post was that it would be just this issue where I would expect the peer-review process to break down. I don’t think we’ll ever hear of cache of leaked documents revealing suppressed facts about quarks. I don’t know, maybe, but I’ll bet we don’t. And that’s also kind of what I was hinting at, that other posters covered after me. You’re never, ever going to have a reliable peer-review process in such an environment. So just what the hell are we supposed to do short of just getting lucky like it appear we did here?

[PRCalDude]

[quote]Cortes wrote:

I’ve certainly felt for some time, though, that something like this was going on, and it does not feel surprising to me in the slightest. Sorry to be so, ahem, “obtuse,” but one of the things I was thinking when I typed my first post was that it would be just this issue where I would expect the peer-review process to break down. I don’t think we’ll ever hear of cache of leaked documents revealing suppressed facts about quarks. I don’t know, maybe, but I’ll bet we don’t. And that’s also kind of what I was hinting at, that other posters covered after me. You’re never, ever going to have a reliable peer-review process in such an environment. So just what the hell are we supposed to do short of just getting lucky like it appear we did here?
[/quote]

Peer review is dead:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017987/climategate-what-gores-useful-idiot-ed-begley-jr-doesnt-get-about-the-peer-review-process/

[PRCalDude]

What’s really at the bottom? Well, I have a hunch. Some of the same wonderful people who gave us CDSs are behind the invention of “carbon credits” and “cap 'n trade:”
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/12/woman-who-invented-credit-default-swaps.html

Obviously, ManBearpig has some serious dough invested in this as well, and so do a lot of the other IPCC members. The latter have probably been promised lucrative “advisory positions” in the nascent Carbon Credit market at various financial institutions.

It’s probably time to line the financiers and their supporters up against a wall and shoot them before they get us into another world war.

[pat]

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]JEATON wrote:

Did you read the actual story and check the accompanying links? The point is, where was the peer review when the numbers were being cooked. Was the incentives to this particular segment of the academic community too great for them not to skew the data? After all, if there is not a problem then “poof.” There goes the money.

[/quote]

Form the link:

The details of the science are beyond you and me. So are the details of just about everything. The world is complex and growing more complex. What we do understand is deliberate chicanery by experts with a political agenda.

This sums everything up.

The questions that skeptics should be asking is just where do we stand on climate research? In the grand scheme of climate research, how big is this? Just in what way was the data twisted? What raw data just made up? Was only some data taken into account? What exactly was wrong.

Given the well stated quote above, these are exactly the sort of questions that should be asked. Unfortunately, no questions are being asked. Instead, people are blinding assuming the worst. They are more worried about making up names like “climategate” then actually asking those questions. The right is just happy to have some reply, no some excuse, to the climate research.

In the end it might be that this all has thrown man-made global warming out the window. The point is that that’s exactly the question, and as quick as many on the left are to dismiss this the right is to jump on it. [/quote]

I do not disagree with your assertions on the break down of peer review. But in looking at this case specifically, the assertion is suddenly backup by significant facts, that the published research was deliberately manipulated to present a desired result rather than a factual one. The suppressed data challenges the conclusion they came up with so in lay terms, the entire global community was lied to about climate change.

This has several huge implications. Is man made warming real? Well now, we really do not know. The climate research cannot be trusted because it has been found that significant pieces of data we manipulated or deliberately omitted.
Can this data be salvaged enough so that a modified actual, factual, truthful conclusion can be determined? I don’t know. Usually when something like this is unearth, the corruption is far deeper than anyone imagined (see Watergate). There is likely a significant amount of data permanently destroyed.

How potent is the scandal? Just observe the behavior of BO and other major players in climate change advocacy. While initially BO was to have a significant presents at the conference, he is going to make little more than a token visit. Many beating the climate change drum have fallen silent or significantly toned down their rhetoric until this thing can be sorted out. All we have left are a few journalists ranting that if you don’t believe in man-made global warming your just an idiot.

What’s next? I think this will get bigger, because more will come out. The seal has been removed. In the end everyone was done a great disservice. Much of this research will have to be redone. It has set the science back years. If man has an influence in climate, now we just don’t know back to the 1970’s with what we do and do not know about it.

[Headhunter]

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

I’ve certainly felt for some time, though, that something like this was going on, and it does not feel surprising to me in the slightest. Sorry to be so, ahem, “obtuse,” but one of the things I was thinking when I typed my first post was that it would be just this issue where I would expect the peer-review process to break down. I don’t think we’ll ever hear of cache of leaked documents revealing suppressed facts about quarks. I don’t know, maybe, but I’ll bet we don’t. And that’s also kind of what I was hinting at, that other posters covered after me. You’re never, ever going to have a reliable peer-review process in such an environment. So just what the hell are we supposed to do short of just getting lucky like it appear we did here?
[/quote]

Peer review is dead:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017987/climategate-what-gores-useful-idiot-ed-begley-jr-doesnt-get-about-the-peer-review-process/
[/quote]

Yup. When one of your colleagues at the university drives up in a new Escalade, that pretty much spells the end of objectivity.

[stokedporcupine8]

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

You really want to use one of the most heavily regulated industries on earth to argue for regulation? Okay. Compare autos with calculators – the price of autos has skyrocketed, while a good calculator can be had for a few dollars. The market made calculators WAAAAY cheaper. What happened to autos?

The free market cannot be beaten, only thwarted at gunpoint. And that’s eventually where any sort of ‘curving’ winds up. Simply look at the world around you and quit dreaming of fantasyland.
[/quote]

You do realize that I’m not talking about regulation for the benefit of lower prices, but regulation for the benefit of stopping ecological disaster? I never said that regulation was good for prices…

[stokedporcupine8]

[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Someday, I hope everyone figures out that using continuous functions for discontinuous systems (like systems of living beings) is simply stupid and utopian. This view that continuous functions can do this has led to more disasters than we can imagine.

Just think of the swath of destruction from GW, the industries ruined, jobs lost, fortunes destroyed…all so Al Gore can make billions and now allows Obama to take vengeance against whitey for not ‘sharing the wealth’.[/quote]

Please, the flaws are not in the modeling methods but in the lack of background data. It is not that modeling discontinuous functional events with a continuous function is somehow fundamentally in error, but that often models are made without enough knowledge about those discontinuous function events. Picking on climatology methods is fine, but at least do it from a legitimate perspective. The general lack of understanding of climate is the problem, not methods.

Besides, you do realize that any discontinuous function can be written as an infinite series of continuous ones, right? (And very closely approximated as a small finite sum of them. See, I can throw around general knowledge about mathematics too.)

[stokedporcupine8]

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

While Bill’s criticisms are not without substance, this still sounds a bit simplistic to me. While it seems odd that you can’t give accurate short term predictions but can give accurate long term predictions, it’s not hard to imagine why. The two sorts of predictions are dependent on different variables. Short term predictions require knowing all sorts of precise factors, while long term trends (according to geological records) seem to be fairly correlated to only a few easy to measure variables. To blindly assume that being able to predict one allows you to predict the other is to miss how the predictions are made.
[/quote]
Do you have any evidence of this - that “long term predictions are correlated with only a few easy-to-measure variables?” Why would short-term measurements be any different? You seem to accept this based on what someone else has told you.

The fact that long term geological trends are correlated with certain variables does not mean that those variables caused the trends, rather those variables provide the most accurate data ABOUT the trends.

If what you are saying were true, scientists would have no reason to fudge the data they got from their models, right?

Just out of curiosity, how much modeling have you actually done?
[/quote]

I’m not a climatologist, I’m simply mentioning important distinctions that Bill has not mentioned in his criticism. The point, which you have entirely missed in your response, is that it is not correct to merely infer from a lack of predicative power in local, short term events that there must be a lack of predictive power in global, long term events.

As for your distinction about “cause” and “about”, what is important is correlation. Do those correlations indicate cause? I don’t know, that takes a well developed theory. Since I’m not a climatologist, I can’t comment.

As for what reasons scientists have for fudging data, who knows.

As for my own experience modeling, while I’m certainly no expert in the area, I do have an undergraduate eduction in math and physics. I’m quite well acquainted with the modeling of things like heat flow and quantum mechanical systems. While I’ve never done any serious statistical modeling, I’m familiar enough with the general methods. So, when I criticize HH for making a big deal about continuous functions, I’m not talking out my ass.

There are, actually, other examples in both science and economics of such predictive disparity. In economics, I believe, it’s virtually impossible to predict the spending habits of one individual, but possible to predict the spending habits of larger groups.

How can you say this with a straight face? Back in 2006, economists were telling us the US had entered a “new paradigm” with its housing market and that prices could only go up, UP, UP! Look at us now. Only a handful predicted our current credit contraction and deflationary cycle.

I guarantee you that I could make a much more accurate model of an individual’s spending habits simply by looking at past spending habits and income and extrapolating.

How can I say it with a straight face? How can you on the one hand use the latest housing crises as an example of the failure of large-scale economic modeling while on the other hand, I’m sure, talk about how anyone who actually knew something about economics (like peter schiff) could predict the crises? If you’re going to discredit large-scale predictions in economics, I hope you’re ready to stop posting about how capitalism is good. How do you know?

[quote]
Besides, you’re getting off point, which as I mentioned is that the case of predictions isn’t as simple as was suggested.

While the quantum mechanics example is weak, and the economics example possibly not quite correct, the point is to illustrate how changing the domain (time scale, quantity of people, size of object) of a certain prediction (temperature, spending habits, position) effects the sort of prediction being made. [/quote]

Completely different animal. On a quantum level, you can’t measure things without simultaneously affecting what you’re measuring. This is not true of hurricane predictions, economics, etc. I don’t affect the trajectory of a hurricane by flying into it with a C-130 in order to take data. Buoy data does not affect swell direction and fetch.

First, the inability of making predictions about individual particles in quantum mechanics has nothing to do with the effect of measuring. One cannot make predictions about individual particles because the behavior of the particles is inherently probabilistic. Hence the best we can do is to give the probabilities of finding a particle in a given spot, for example. Besides, what you mention about the problem of simultaneously measuring, say, position and momentum has more to do with again the stochastoic nature of quantum mechanics. You can derive, purely from the definitions of position and momentum in quantity mechanics the uncertainly principle. It’s not something that need be explained by talking about measurement.

As for whether the examples are relevant, of course they are. The point, again, is about how disparities in predictive power don’t mean anything. There are, as I’ve given, lots of examples where science or economics fails at making predictions about a topic in one domain but succeeds in another. The reason for this lies in what factors are relevant for the predictions.

[stokedporcupine8]

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]JEATON wrote:

Did you read the actual story and check the accompanying links? The point is, where was the peer review when the numbers were being cooked. Was the incentives to this particular segment of the academic community too great for them not to skew the data? After all, if there is not a problem then “poof.” There goes the money.

[/quote]

Form the link:

The details of the science are beyond you and me. So are the details of just about everything. The world is complex and growing more complex. What we do understand is deliberate chicanery by experts with a political agenda.

This sums everything up.

The questions that skeptics should be asking is just where do we stand on climate research? In the grand scheme of climate research, how big is this? Just in what way was the data twisted? What raw data just made up? Was only some data taken into account? What exactly was wrong.

Given the well stated quote above, these are exactly the sort of questions that should be asked. Unfortunately, no questions are being asked. Instead, people are blinding assuming the worst. They are more worried about making up names like “climategate” then actually asking those questions. The right is just happy to have some reply, no some excuse, to the climate research.

In the end it might be that this all has thrown man-made global warming out the window. The point is that that’s exactly the question, and as quick as many on the left are to dismiss this the right is to jump on it. [/quote]

I do not disagree with your assertions on the break down of peer review. But in looking at this case specifically, the assertion is suddenly backup by significant facts, that the published research was deliberately manipulated to present a desired result rather than a factual one. The suppressed data challenges the conclusion they came up with so in lay terms, the entire global community was lied to about climate change.

This has several huge implications. Is man made warming real? Well now, we really do not know. The climate research cannot be trusted because it has been found that significant pieces of data we manipulated or deliberately omitted.
Can this data be salvaged enough so that a modified actual, factual, truthful conclusion can be determined? I don’t know. Usually when something like this is unearth, the corruption is far deeper than anyone imagined (see Watergate). There is likely a significant amount of data permanently destroyed.

How potent is the scandal? Just observe the behavior of BO and other major players in climate change advocacy. While initially BO was to have a significant presents at the conference, he is going to make little more than a token visit. Many beating the climate change drum have fallen silent or significantly toned down their rhetoric until this thing can be sorted out. All we have left are a few journalists ranting that if you don’t believe in man-made global warming your just an idiot.

What’s next? I think this will get bigger, because more will come out. The seal has been removed. In the end everyone was done a great disservice. Much of this research will have to be redone. It has set the science back years. If man has an influence in climate, now we just don’t know back to the 1970’s with what we do and do not know about it.
[/quote]

I certainly agree. My negative reactions in this thread though were not about how peer review has worked in this case of climate research, but my reactions where were to the OP’s argument that given “climategate” and the poor state of health/fitness research we should discredit peer review and “experts”. This is, as I’ve tried to say, not only a ridiculous generalization but also the sort of silly reasoning that reinforces the anti-scientific culture in America. This is the sort of thinking that seems to lead to the idea that we should open up public “wikis” to determine the truth about Bible commentary, evolution, climate change, stem cell research and who knows what else.

[JEATON]

When I think of climatologists today I cannot help but think of the “quants” that invaded the finance world over the last decade. They had the model and therefore had everything figured out. Or so they thought. Then came the “black swans.”

It isn’t that I do not believe in climate change (I do)or even the possibility of human caused climate change. What I find suspect is the “doomsday” scenarios that carted out along with the assertion that “the debate is over.” How can the debate be over if there is so much contentious debate over the subject?

[Bill_Roberts]

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

While Bill’s criticisms are not without substance, this still sounds a bit simplistic to me. While it seems odd that you can’t give accurate short term predictions but can give accurate long term predictions, it’s not hard to imagine why. The two sorts of predictions are dependent on different variables. Short term predictions require knowing all sorts of precise factors, while long term trends (according to geological records) seem to be fairly correlated to only a few easy to measure variables. To blindly assume that being able to predict one allows you to predict the other is to miss how the predictions are made.
[/quote]
Do you have any evidence of this - that “long term predictions are correlated with only a few easy-to-measure variables?” Why would short-term measurements be any different? You seem to accept this based on what someone else has told you.

The fact that long term geological trends are correlated with certain variables does not mean that those variables caused the trends, rather those variables provide the most accurate data ABOUT the trends.

If what you are saying were true, scientists would have no reason to fudge the data they got from their models, right?

Just out of curiosity, how much modeling have you actually done?
[/quote]

I’m not a climatologist, I’m simply mentioning important distinctions that Bill has not mentioned in his criticism. [/quote]

Well, in this particular thread I’ve preferred to make only fairly short statements.

More broadly speaking, I have addressed this at other times and you’re right, it should be addressed again.

To evaluate a model legitimately, one has to see if it is capable of predicting data that was not in any way used to create that model.

It is no feat whatsoever to create a model that matches, reasonably closely, known data. For example, you could provide a string of random numbers and a function can be created that fits that series exactly.

But any claim that that function is capable of predicting future numbers would be completely unwarranted and false.

Or you could have some very complex function which generates a series of numbers from some inputs, and you could provide me with some subset of that output and tell me what some or even all of those inputs are. It would be no great feat to produce a model which on those given inputs and known outputs produces an almost-matching series. But this would not mean that the model actually replicates your very complex function – it’s quite unlikely that it will: it may in fact completely lack or overweight perhaps some feedback functions or dependencies on given variables – or that it will continue to produce matching outputs.

It may well only be able to match the outputs of your function where those outputs were used in creating the model. For the model to be taken seriously, it would have to be able to predict data not used to create the model. Without that, it’s an exercise and nothing more, and most certainly it proves nothing.

If modeling as done by the AGW crowd were done in an intellectually honest manner, their demonstration of validity would include that the model in fact “predicts” known data that was not used in the creation of the model.

That hasn’t been done. And when it has been tried it fails: e.g., when you leave out the 1950s, the models cannot “predict” the 1950s.

I recall the predictions made around the year 2000 for the 2000-2009 decade. The temperature projection kept rising past the 1998 level.

The model did not predict correctly.

What the AGW computer modeling is is nothing but fitting the same data that was used to create the model.

This is bullshit and would not, so far as I know, be accepted as proving anything in any other field.

[HG_Thrower]

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

Nonsense? If the claims of man-made climate change are true, then certainly the consequences of not acting are to great. Who cares about the economy if Europe enters an ice age, or coastal cities like New York are swallowed by the sea?

[/quote]
The problem I have with this is that your “certain” statement is in NO way certain.

#1 - Models to predict effects of GW are just as flawed as the temperature models. Sea level models haven’t been accurate. Ice volume models haven’t been accurate. At some point, we need to accept the fact that we do NOT have the ability to accurately predict the behavior of a chaotic system as complex as golbal climate. As PR said, we can’t even predict things like LOCAL climate or financial markets with any accuracy, and they are orders of magnitude LESS complex!

#2- What’s to say that a warmer climate isn’t BETTER? The head of NASA said this very thing last year, and got blasted by the AGW folks and I believe was canned by Obama. Cold-related deaths far outnumber heat-related. Again, this is overly simplified, but we don’t have the tools to know. We DO know from historical records that people from Europe sailed to Greenland to farm during the Medieveal Warm Period. Doesn’t sound so catastrophic to me. So why throw away our way of life (and redistribute our money to the third world) for something so uncertain?

[Bill_Roberts]

Why, don’cha know, global warming will produce killer hurricanes. Katrina will look like a light sprinkle.

[stokedporcupine8]

[quote]HG Thrower wrote:

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

Nonsense? If the claims of man-made climate change are true, then certainly the consequences of not acting are to great. Who cares about the economy if Europe enters an ice age, or coastal cities like New York are swallowed by the sea?

[/quote]
The problem I have with this is that your “certain” statement is in NO way certain.

#1 - Models to predict effects of GW are just as flawed as the temperature models. Sea level models haven’t been accurate. Ice volume models haven’t been accurate. At some point, we need to accept the fact that we do NOT have the ability to accurately predict the behavior of a chaotic system as complex as golbal climate. As PR said, we can’t even predict things like LOCAL climate or financial markets with any accuracy, and they are orders of magnitude LESS complex!

#2- What’s to say that a warmer climate isn’t BETTER? The head of NASA said this very thing last year, and got blasted by the AGW folks and I believe was canned by Obama. Cold-related deaths far outnumber heat-related. Again, this is overly simplified, but we don’t have the tools to know. We DO know from historical records that people from Europe sailed to Greenland to farm during the Medieveal Warm Period. Doesn’t sound so catastrophic to me. So why throw away our way of life (and redistribute our money to the third world) for something so uncertain? [/quote]

You do realize that the context in which I said that was entirely conditional? The argument was over whether if the global warming crowd was correct then the consequences of not taking action where dire. Hence whether or not the global warming crowd is correct is irrelevant to what I was saying. As I said, clearly, if they are right, then the consequences of not acting are dire.

[Bill_Roberts]

So you’re saying, if they are correct that the consequences are dire, then the consequences are dire?

[stokedporcupine8]

Besides, this whole “whose to know” argument is bullshit. Most of you who are quick to suggest that we can’t possibly know what sort of consequences might follow from man-made carbon emission sure think you know lots about equally complicated things like economics.

Whose to know what will happen if they implement cap and trade. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? It’s equally silly when you say whose to know what will happen if we warm the earth such and such degrees.