When are they useful?
Category Archives: Mathematics
Climate And Natural Disasters
Note that despite the phrase “climate-influenced natural disasters,” this article at SciAm doesn’t actually provide any evidence of it.
Mike’s Nature Trick
An explanation for Scott Adams (note Steve McIntyre’s suggestion in comments).
Ocean Warming
No, it’s probably not accelerating faster than we thought.
[Early-afternoon update]
Modern warming was driven primarily by “primarily natural” factors; the cooling has begun.
The Little Ice Age
..and deep Pacific Ocean cooling.
Gee, I thought that’s where the heat was hiding?
Gun Control
A statistician changes her mind after actually looking at the data:
“A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible,” Libresco concludes. “We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.”
Libresco says she still does not endorse gun ownership, “but I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them.”
What a concept.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment
Anthony Watts is having fun with it.
I continue to be amazed at people who continue to attempt to compare landing a probe on another planet to predicting something as complex as the climate and the economy eight decades from now.
[Thursday-morning update]
Bjorn Lomborg: What the media got all wrong about the report.
Pretty much everything.
[Update Friday morning]
“The NCA’s projections are simply not borne out by the data.”
Unexpectedly!
[Bumped]
[Late-morning update]
How the Trump administration blew it on the NCA:
The Administration now has a problem since some Democrats say they will use the report to oppose a number of the Trump Administration’s attempts to weaken a number of the Obama climate regulations that they have proposed, including using the report to persuade courts to reinstate the original Obama Administration regulations. All this was quite foreseeable. So why did the Administration publish the report without reviewing it? Was it because it was not paying attention to what the bureaucracy was doing? This is hard to believe, but appears now to be the case. One obvious possibility is that they wanted to avoid the charge that they had “corrupted” the report writing process. But the costs are likely to be high. Another possibility is that Acting Administrator Wheeler did not want to endure questions about possible intervention at his confirmation hearing. But the evidence appears to suggest inattention by the Trump Administration was the major problem.
You don’t say.
Sea-Level Rise
In the context of the report released on Friday, Judith Curry has issued her own final report on it:
Why have I devoted so much time to the sea level rise issue? First, I regard sea level rise to be the most consequential potential impact of predicted global warming. Second, there is a great deal of public confusion about the issue, including decision makers. Third, a number of CFAN’s clients have queried me about a range of specific concerns that they have regarding sea level rise (and I have been doing consulting on this topic).
Why do I think an independent assessment of the sea level rise issue by yours truly is needed, given the plethora of international and national assessment reports? My clients are concerned about the alarmist predictions they have encountered. I have seen various ‘experts’ make public statements projecting 21st century sea level to be as high as 9 m [30 feet]. My clients are looking for someone that they trust to provide an objective assessment that focuses on their issues of concern.
I am not a published expert on sea level rise, although I have published some relevant papers in oceanography and the climate dynamics of the polar regions. What I bring to this assessment is a broader perspective on the issues of climate dynamics, climate modeling and uncertainty than most of the community working on the sea level rise issue. In any event, it is arguably useful for a knowledgeable person outside of the publishing sea level community to provide an independent assessment.
Yes. It will be interesting to see the response from the alarmists, if any.
Admitting Mistakes
…”in a hostile environment.” Some thoughts from Judith Curry:
Ralph Keeling behaved with honesty and dignity by publicly admitting these errors and thanking Nic Lewis.
Such behavior shouldn’t be news, however; it is how all scientists should behave, always.
Imagine how the course of climate science and the public debate on climate change would be different if Michael Mann would have behaved in a similar way in response to McIntyre and McKitrick’s identification of problems with the hockey stick analysis.
I don’t think he’s capable of it.
By quickly admitting mistakes and giving credit where due, Ralph Keeling has done something unusual and laudatory in the field of climate science. If all climate scientists behaved this way, there would be no ‘hostile environment.’
I find it to be a sad state of affairs when a scientist admitting mistakes gets more kudos than the scientist actually finding the mistakes. But given the state of climate science, I guess finding mistakes seems to be a more common story than a publishing scientist actually admitting to mistakes.
Sadly, yes.
About That Ocean-Warming Study
They screwed the pooch. And we’re not all gonna die from overheated oceans. Good for Nic Lewis. And this demonstrates once again of the lack of value of peer review.
Funny how, like “mistakes” in reporting on politics, these errors always seem to go in one direction.