We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The Scientific Method is over-rated Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what we’re dealing with.
– Steven Guilbeault, Greenpeace 2005, as quoted by Canada Free Press
Afterwards, another activist clarified the remark by stating that of course taller can also be evidence of shortness, richer can mean living in poverty, baboons can mean chairs, giraffes can mean pencils and hello Ms. Robinson, your lacy trousers are well buttered with smoked trout, can you hear what I’m writing with my toaster?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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It depends on how specific the predictions are. If scientists are predicting that the temperature will rise in Africa, decrease in Europe, and the weather will get wetter in India, then the science is not so bad.
There’s tomorrow’s SQotD, right there.
Of course his statement is true. Climate is a chaotic process. Inputting large amounts of energy can kick it into another chaotic state but we cannot predict what that state will be. This is true of pretty much any system that is non-linear.
If it is true that we are putting more energy into the climate system, it would indeed be the case that we may very well not be able to predict what the end result will be if we push it to a bifurcation point.
Perhaps they should not use the term ‘Global Warming’ at all; it’s the additional energy that changes things. At the moment that initial energy might be showing up as warming in some places. In the long run it is any body’s guess.
I will add the caveat that I am not so confident as many that we are anywhere near a bifurcation point.
I’m loathe to give a Greenpeace staffer the benefit of the doubt, but I’ve no idea what the wider context of this quotation is, and amazingly all those people making fun of the stupid quote never quite get around to citing where he actually said that. Amazing, no?
On the one hand it is true that adding energy to a complex system doesn’t have predictable results. But it’s also true that this doesn’t give you an excuse to point to any observed phenomenon as proof of your hypothesis.
It is difficult to prove that more energy has entered the system, because it’s a rather big complicated system. It’s also hard to say if the system is more volatile than it was, because we’ve only been watching it properly for such a short space of time (a couple hundred years).
Basically both sides of the argument need to stop calling each other names and going “Snow in China! You’re wrong!” “No, melting ice shelves! You’re wrong!” because that’s not really helping.
Some of the fiercest ‘climate sceptics’ I know of are Oxford University climate researchers. They do not deny anthropogenic warming, but since they know a lot about how the predictions are made and how reliable they are they are driven absolutely nuts by media and policy.
The key problems they mention are 1) that a little uncertainty in the physics model and its parameters produces a huge range of variation, but most people just bundle together models into a median prediction. 2) the models may not converge even in principle as we learn more or get bigger computers. 3) the predictions are reasonably consistent for high and low latitudes, but near the low mid latitudes we have no agreement. This is unfortunately the places where the most important impacts are likely. 4) we do not have good (or even decent) models of how changed climate carry over to changed economy, social stresses and other things in the human sphere. Many key areas like fishing are completely unstudied. 5) most such models when they exist completely disregard that humans change the economic and social rules far faster than climate is likely to change.
Taken together, there is some good science and modelling being done, but enormously much more policy being produced. Much of this policy is based on the illusion of knowledge and will turn out to be very resistant to the arrival of better knowledge.
One powerful method we could use to counter the global warming problem here in Britain would be to drop a big bomb on
Norwich PolytechnicThe University Of East Anglia.Perhaps they should not use the term ‘Global Warming’ at all; it’s the additional energy that changes things. At the moment that initial energy might be showing up as warming in some places. In the long run it is any body’s guess.
What he said.
We should stick to Climate Change, it could mean a lot of things a lot of which we can’t predict properly.
For crying out loud, it was 13.5C _at night_ when I was in London the week before last. It was 20C in Malmo (Southern Sweden) today. Even allowing for occasionally out of kilter temperatures, that’s just weird.
@Ian B
A trifle harsh, surely?
How about a small, high-yield one?
Climate change happens. It happens all the time. It happened a lot when there weren’t any humans around. And when the sun goes pop the climate will change again.
Guaranteed.
But all this is no reason to tax us more, browbeat us, chasitise us, condemn us or generally make us feel bad. It is no reason for smug self-satisfied hacks to waste paper with their opinion on it all.
It is no reason to give people airtime to sound off about how it will all mean we will perish next week/next month/next century.
Tomorrow it may rain, or it may not. So get over it.
Until the AGW crowd start making hard empiricaly testable predictions that are falsifiable, they are not making Science, just hot air (pun intended).
First they said greenhouse gases would make the Earth hotter; when it turned out the Earth had been cooling when we were increasing our GH gases emisions, they said the temperature increase had been masked by the cooling effects of aerosols (pollution to you and me). And then a bunch of scientists actually measured the effects of “brown clouds” on local temperatures in Asia, and guess what, it turns out they increase local temperature rather than decrease them.
Then they said that once the aerosol effect was overcome (which one, the heating or the cooling?), the temperature will increase much more rapidly; the aerosols have been reduced, and you know what, we have just had 9 years without increase in the average Earth temperature.
And now they say that global warming can be quiet for a while, but will suddenly accelerate at some (not clearly specified) point in the future, by which time it will all be too late. How the hell can you call that a prediction? How can you test for it? Any fluctuating system can exhibit periods of quiesence followed by (apparently) sudden activity without it being indicative of anything but natural variability.
2007 was going to be a record year for hurricanes in the Atlantic; then it wasn’t.
GW was going to bring drought to continental interiors, and now people in the Chinese interior are shovelling snow by the ton.
The Gulf Stream was weakening and it was due to GH gases, then they found it had not been weakening after all.
And saying that the climate system is chaotic is not saying much; if I remember my Classical Mechanics correctly, many locally chaotic systems do exhibit a great degree of stability at greater scales. Also, pumping energy into a system does not need to make it more variable; that can only be so if it is an otherwise closed system; something that is not proven for Earth’s atmosphere.
Let’s face it, the entire Climate Change “science” is one huge “benefit of the doubt” area.
J,
He said it at a protest outside the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2005 in Montreal, Canada. I assume it was an attempt to lift the heavy irony of the sight of people bundled up in cold weather gear against freezing temperatures to protest about things being too hot. But that irony is heavy stuff.
He’s quite correct to say that individual weather events demonstrate nothing, and generally cannot be attributed to any definite cause. But Greenpeace only ever say this when it’s cold – any time it’s unusually warm it’s definitely a sign of global warming. All the sceptics I’ve come across seem to be well aware of the point, and only cite cold weather extremes or examples of the Gore Effect out of humour or as a counterexample to all the stupid claims, but there may be some who don’t and truly believe it. I don’t know.
The point being made here is a valid one. It’s the way the story changes depending on what questions are being asked that constitutes the problem. A scientific theory must make falsifiable predictions, which need to be checked before it can be accepted. But most of the predictions accessible to the public are for 50 to 100 years later, which is no use. The public presentation contains no short-term detailed predictions that can be checked, only post facto cherry picking of ‘signs’ that always seem to be confirming evidence global warming whichever way they go. If you persist, you will be told that it’s all a lot more complicated than in the initial explanation you were given, that many details are still uncertain and there’s enough wiggle-room and potential complications to accommodate all the bits that appear not to fit, but when you don’t you’re told that it’s simple and uncontroversial, there’s no debate, the scientific consensus has reached its conclusion, the evidence is overwhelming, and so on. If it’s too soon to find such definite confirmation, the science isn’t “in”, is it?
It’s the inconsistency that bugs me. It’s like trying to nail a blancmange to the ceiling.
Rather than dropping a bomb on UEA, I vote we drop one on University College Suffolk, a misnomer if ever there was one.
Maybe we could take out the Binmen’s home of Poorman Rd in the collateral damage.
OTBC
Any human impact on climate is bad … period.
We should sacrifice our civilization on that altar because any old excuse to sacrifice our civilization will do.
What bugs me about the confident predictions of the IPCC and their political hangers on, is the lack of reliable data about the key components of their theory and their seemling complete indifference to rectifying this lack.
When I observe the arguments that sites such as ClimateAudit and Wattsupwith hat have with the likes of RealClimate, and the teeth-pulling difficulty McIntyre and McKittrick have in getting the data from Mann, Hansen and their like, it’s enough to get me tearing my hair out.
Not only are they arguing about past, present and future temperatures as well as past present and future CO2 levels, but their are often long complex threads about how and how much CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas (and many argue that CO2 effects the climate not at all).
For the price of a single IPCC Annual Report we could have beefed up the land based sensor system over the last twenty years to give us a decent handle on global temperature and CO2 levels and the rate of change of both of them.
If, twenty years ago, we had invested the money wasted on negotiating the Kyoto Accord on a network of temperature, pressure, humidity and CO2 sensors in the dry places of the world we might have obtained by now a database which could give us a handle on separating the CO2 signal from the H20 signal, (since deserts would give us the best available conditions for doing just that) and if we supplemented the network with balloon based sensors and satellites we would know a lot more about heat transfer in the atmosphere.
OK, maintaining a sensor network in such remote conditions would not be as glamorous as jollies in Bali and Hawaii, or as CV enhancing as generating killer code on the latest super-computer, but I submit it would give us a better base of knowledge to make accurate predictions with.
The problem with the IPCC and the shit-storm they have raised is they not only need the answers now, they have raised the entirely false perception that unless we change our evil ways right now, we’re all doomed. Doomed I say. Doomed.
Scrap Kyoto. Scrap the IPCC. Stick the likes of Gore and Suzuki in Gitmo and then start doing real science.
We already know the answer to that one — the correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature is very poor, both over the last century and over geological time. Since correlation does not prove causation, what does lack of correlation prove?
We have good historic & geologic evidence that the climate has been continuously variable (Ice Ages, anyone?). The simplest & most obvious explanation of any climate change in the last few decades is a continuation of that well-estalished natural variability. Scientists used to call that Occam’s Razor. But then, scientists used not to be dependent on government grants.
Now there are greedy politicians chanting “scientific concensus”, and spineless scientists keeping their mouths shut while their grant applications are being reviewed. Someone pointed out — if there really is scientific concensus on anthropogenic global warming, then there is nothing left to learn; let’s stop all tapayer funding for research right now. Would be interesting to see how long the claims of scientific concensus would last!
Alice:
You’re right in much of what you say, but my main point is that if these people were seriously concerned with what they purport to believe, they would have invested in real data collection and real science to establish the facts, (in so far as facts can be established in an area as variable as climate).
In addition, a good, reliable, accepted, data base and some sound science can help us in doing what we need to do in the face of climate change. Adapt.
When the ‘consensus’ collapses the field of climatology will likely take a big hit, but we will still need to study our climate because change will still happen and the more we know about the many factors which bear on our climate, the better we will be able to cope with change.
This spring the snows will melt in North America and China, but in some spring not too far in the future it’s quite possible that the snows will not melt, and a warning of when that might occur and what, (if anything), we can do about it will be invaluable.
In a posting questioning the scientific method, what has a quote from Greenpeace got to do with anything?
Greenpeace uses science when it fits the Greenpeace agenda, and appeals to sentiment, ignorance and bigotry when it doesn’t.
This statement is an appeal to ignorance and bigotry, not science.
Kevin B wrote:
You are absolutely right. Most alarmists are unaware of how few temperature stations there are, or even that the number has been declining. Better data is the prerequisite for any serious investigation of climate.
But I do like the debating point of proposing an end to the $billions spent annually on climate research since there is supposedly “scientific consensus’ 🙂
Jesus people we are the human race – improvise.