14 thoughts on “The Limits Of Knowledge”

  1. Of course it has an epistemological problem but fundamentally it’s not about justification at all. This is the leftist trap that the right can’t help but fall into. It has nothing to do with reason. It’s a complete ploy for the purpose of control.

    It has a lot in common with the wall to wall coverage of Trump’s hot mike.

    In both cases they want an outcome that has nothing to do with the fake outrage they promote.

    1. 1) Fake up a problem. “Grandma is starving and eating catfood”.
      2) Haul out the Bloody Shirt, wave it fiercely. “Money will save Grandma!”
      3) Bash the slightest opposition as holding a strawman position. “Any opposition must want Grandma to starve!”

      Republicans are always caught arguing “Grandma isn’t eating catfood” and “We don’t want Grandma to die.” They should be arguing “Democrats can’t even manage a three-step logical argument without lying about the opposition.”

      If they were the slightest bit concerned about Global Mean Surface Temperature, there would be serious efforts to actually calibrate it against the available proxy measurements for use as an actual engineering quantity. Meaning: Flood -somewhere- with 10,000+ competent thermometers and generate actual, instrumental error bars instead of the ‘internal self-consistency’ error bars we’ve got on the existing proxies.

      1. I haven’t even seen a serious attempt to make a good temperature measurement. Anthony Watts has talked a lot about siting and placement, but frankly any measurement needs to be taken much further away from the ground. No matter how many thermometers you use, having them a few feet above the surface means that natural processes will bring them all significantly closer to that surface as dirt accumulates (thus we have archaeology).

        I would suggest putting analog thermometers on every cell tower or broadcast antenna, but below any high power concentrated microwave sources, and read them optically with a small fixed telescope and a networked camera.

        1. Of course, historical temperature measurements were not handled so carefully, and for most of the measurements in the USA that value could be measured no more precisely than +/- 0.5 degrees F. For over 100 years the actual temperature could have been 0.45 degrees warmer than was recorded, or 0.45 degrees colder, we don’t know. Any modeled fluctuation smaller than that error bar is insignificant (in all senses of the word).

        2. Your point (and Ed’s below) are precisely my points.

          The measurements we have are being treated as “An instrumental record”. They are – but they’re an mediocre point-source measurement of a volumetric attribute. That is: They are actually yet another proxy, not a true instrumental record.

          My “At least 10,000 thermometer” approach is at least -start- to figure out exactly how far off a single thermometer proxy might be. With experiments designed (and true random choices of subsets) one can actually start making comments about what the ‘gridcell temperature error’ might be from a single thermometer, instead of propagating the -reading- error.

          Ed, the instrumental error is one thing. And when the surface stations are used for plane deicing and other point-of-interest type activities, that error can be the crucial one. But the very next step of using the individual surface station is to say “Ok, so the next-closest thermometer is 100 miles in all directions, and this is the only thermometer inside this gridcell, so we’re taking this measurement as the gridcell termperature. And taking that 0.5F(or so) instrumental error as the -gridcell- temperature measurement error because we don’t have anything better..

          IOW: I can’t measure the temperature of my backyard with one thermometer to 0.5F without careful pre-analysis. (That is: cherry-picking my siting based on a careful review.) And I -do- have a spot for a high-quality surface station, it’s just that that particular spot would happen to always read -high- by at least five degrees if we’re talking “What is the temperature of contents of an imaginary box formed from the property lines and between one meter and three meters above solid ground and any water.”

          1. Well, instrument and siting errors abound but Weatherunderground has weather stations all over the place. With better instrumentation and siting, would this be a model for collecting temperature data?

            Tough to say because in the city that I live in, there is a ten point spread in temperatures. How can anyone say what the temperature is in any given area when there is so much natural temperature variation?

            Just go to their main site and see how much it varies in your area. https://www.wunderground.com/

      2. I am worried about a problem that is far from faked, but the proposed solution is even worse than that.

        Specifically, the poster-child Syrian seen dazed and caked in dust from a Russian bombing raid in support of the Assad regime. “What are we (in the U.S.) supposed to do about this” was perhaps the most important question posed at last Sunday’s debate, and to my mind, the most sober response came from Mr. Trump. That is, there is no “good” response, and a proper response is certainly not blundering into a commitment to a no-fly zone that risks war with Russia.

        His opponent Ms. Clinton seems bent on enforcing that no-fly zone. She seems to want to go to war with Iran, too — didn’t President Obama just negotiate a peace with Iran?

        Maybe this won’t be the trigger for an all-out nuclear exchange, but there is a serious risk of Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising” playing out? Is the heart-string tugs of the photo of the Syrian child caked with dust a debris justification from sacrificing our best air and tank crews against a storm of advanced precision-guided munitions?

        I ran this question past Speaker Paul Ryan. I pleaded with him “repudiate Candidate Donald Trump if you must, but please take into consideration what he said about Syria, Iran, and Russia.” He or his staff responded with 8 paragraphs of foreign-and-defense policy boilerplate. I sent him a message expressing concern that with Secretary Kerry’s bluster on Syria, we are risking actions that can escalate into an all-out nuclear war and I get his form letter.

        This suggests to me that Speaker Ryan is playing way outside the league for which he is qualified.

        By the way, the top-of-the-line Russian air defense systems are certainly not “better than anything we have.” If not the Patriot D, certainly the Standard is equal or better than anything the Russians have. The real question is whether our stealth aircraft, Wild Weasels, and war plan for neutralizing what the Russians have with Russian (as opposed to Syrian) operators is up to the task. And the question after that is, where does this neutralization lead to next?

        If Mr. Trump is able to keep us out of WW-III, he can offend whoever he feels like offending.

        1. Maybe this won’t be the trigger for an all-out nuclear exchange,

          Russia just opened their nuclear umbrella putting nuclear capable missiles in Kaliningrad. They are also blanketing their client states in the ME with air defenses. There is a lot of talk about how bad Trump would be but what about the guy who actually is failing as President?

          The time for war in Syria was around 2004 when they were running proxy groups to start a civil war in Iraq and the time to do a no fly zone was prior to Russian intervention in Syria. At best, a small part of Syria might be able to be carved out as a safe zone but even that would create future problems as Assad or the jihadists try and reclaim it.

          1. Is there any possible way that deployment in Kaliningrad can be considered defensive? This is very disturbing. Are they planning a new grab before the next president takes office (believing they can cool down any response as they did the Crimea?)

        2. We’ve let some of our SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defenses) capabilities languish a bit because it’s been a long time since we’ve had to suppress a top-tier SAM system, plus we’ve put money in stealth aircraft instead. While we were doing that, our potential adversaries were upgrading from 1980’s era Soviet electronics to modern electronics and processors.

  4. Correct application of the precautionary principle needs to account for the cost and risk of the proposed preventative. But left wingnut panic driven policy not only exaggerates the problem to claim a need for a “solution”, but also universally dismisses or seriously lowballs the likely costs once they find a “solution” they like. We find this error in the climate change argument, the horridly unaffordable “affordable care act”, and a welfare system that breaks up the family and discourages gainful employment.

    1. Wouldn’t it also have to take into account the possible upsides of a climate optimum that would be sacrificed as the opportunity cost of adopting policies intended to change the climate?

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