Another tale of the Adjustocene.
Category Archives: Mathematics
California’s “Wet Future”
Gee, I’m old enough to remember when the future held endless drought.
Love the phrase "we found" with regard to a climate prediction, as though it's an empirical result, and not just another crap model output. https://t.co/5Km29m5lyN
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 16, 2017
Fedora Issue
I upgraded to 26 overnight, and now I’m missing a (critical) font in Libre Office: Bitstream Charter. I have a huge document that was paginated and properly formatted in it, and now it’s Arial and all effed up. Anyone have any idea what might have happened, and how to fix?
[Friday-morning update]
OK, I went to the Fedora Forum, and they said to reinstall the font, so it works now, except the formatting got munged, so I have to go back and remove extraneous returns that got inserted under the Arial version.
As for the question of why did I “fix something that wasn’t broken,” Fedora is always broken to some degree (as is every OS), and I alway hope the latest version will fix some of the broken things.
Space Safety Follies
Chris Gebhardt (who I met in real life at Vandenberg on Sunday) has the latest in progress in Commercial Crew.
TL;DR: All these numeric safety goals are utterly arbitrary and will be waived when necessary, as they were on Shuttle every single flight. https://t.co/p9JBD4WPlH
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) June 27, 2017
The Y2K Bug
I think it was Reagan who said there was no eternal life, except for a govenment program. The Trump administration is apparently making America great again by ending work on fixing something that didn’t happen seventeen years ago.
Democrats And Climate
They’ve lost the argument, and it’s their own fault:
…many voters don’t see Democrats acting like people who believe we’re facing an extinction level event. For instance, why aren’t we talking about adding hundreds of new nuclear power plants to our energy portfolio? Such an effort would do far more to mitigate carbon emissions than any unreliable solar or windmill boondoggle –certainly more than any non-binding international agreement. Maybe there are tradeoffs, who knows.
Or take prospective presidential hopeful Andrew Cuomo. Setting intentions aside, in all practical ways, he’s been worse for the environment than Trump. Cuomo claims he “is committed to meeting the standards set forth in the Paris Accord regardless of Washington’s irresponsible actions.” Yet as governor, he’s blocked natural gas pipelines and banned fracking, which has proven to be one of the most effective ways to mitigate carbon emissions. U.S. energy-related carbon emissions have fallen almost 14 percent since they peaked in 2007 according to the OECD – this, without any fabricated carbon market schemes. The driving reason is the shift to natural gas. Why do liberals hate science? Why do they condemn our grandchildren to a fiery end?
Fact is, Obama—as was his wont—tried to shift American policy with his pen rather than by building consensus (which was also an assault on proper norms of American governance, but the “Trump is destroying the Constitution!” crowd is conveniently flexible on this issue.) It’s not a feasible or lasting way to govern, unless the system collapses. It is also transparently ideological.
It’s impossible for any intelligent person to take them seriously.
Dilbert One
…”scientists” zero:
…in a sense, the video doesn’t even refute the straw man it set up. It’s not that climate science consists only of models: obviously there are observations too. But all the attribution claims about the climatic effects of greenhouse gases are based on models. If the scientists being interviewed had any evidence otherwise, they didn’t present any.
When you can’t even knock down your own straw man, you don’t have much of an argument.
So how did the video do refuting Scott Adams’ cartoon? He joked that scientists warning of catastrophe invoke the authority of observational data when they are really making claims based on models. Check. He joked that they ignore on a post hoc basis the models that don’t look right to them. Check. He joked that their views presuppose the validity of models that reasonable people could doubt. Check. And he joked that to question any of this will lead to derision and the accusation of being a science denier. Check. In other words, the Yale video sought to rebut Adams’ cartoon and ended up being a documentary version of it.
They would appear to lack self awareness.
Thoughts On What’s Happening In Space
From me, in a podcast with Anthony Colangelo.
California’s Universal Health Care
The cost would be larger than the current state budget.
Because, you know, taxes in California aren’t high enough.
The Uncertainty Monster
Thoughts from Judith Curry on the current state of knowledge in climate. The warm mongers never consider the possibility that their proposed cures may in fact be worse than the disease. I personally think it’s nuts to consider climate a greater threat to humanity than poverty, and particularly energy poverty. But then, many of them don’t really care about humanity, or consider humanity a problem in and of itself.
[Update a few minutes later]
A new paper on the epistemological status of general circulation models.