Category Archives: Mathematics

Administrative, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Baby It’s Cold Outside

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I know I shouldn’t complain in southern California, considering how brutally cold it is back east, but we woke up this morning to a 63-degree house, and listening to a struggling furnace on the morning after the coldest night of the season to date. The blower seems to be on the fritz.

On a Sunday.

I had other plans today, but I’m going to have to take it apart, and see if I can fix it. It’s twelve years old. Hoping it’s just a bad capacitor. I doubt I’d be able to find a replacement motor today.

[Update a few minutes later]

Not really complaining, and have no right to. If we were back east right now, this would be life threatening, and we’d either have to get an emergency HVAC guy in, or find somewhere else to stay, but for us, it’s just an inconvenience. Worst case is extra blankets tonight, and I’ll find a replacement motor (or limit switch, or whatever the problem is) tomorrow.

But it’s also a reminder of how thin the veneer of modern technology can be, and that nature is not our friend. Whatever the climate is doing (and anyone who claims they can confidently predict it out decades is either fooling themselves, or attempting to fool us), we have to maintain enough societal wealth to deal with it. The policies promulgated by those who insist we can control the climate would have the opposite effect.

[Monday-morning update]

When we woke up this morning, temp in the house was 61 F. A couple hours later, it’s down to 60. It will probably warm up when the sun gets higher, but high temp today is only predicted to be 67.

In troubleshooting, I’ve learned two things: 1) Modern gas furnaces are complicated as copulation and 2) the burner isn’t lighting, which is why the blower motor isn’t bothering to. The status light isn’t flashing any of the error codes in the manual, just steady on, the way it’s supposed to if everything is copacetic, so it’s not useful for diagnostics. I’m suspecting the gas valve (a problem with which the control board would be unaware), but not sure how to tell if it’s working. Could also be the igniter, except I’d think I’d at least momentarily smell gas if that were the problem. Anyway, I’ve got to go start poking at things with a VOM.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I am briefly smelling gas when it tries to start up, so the valve seems to be working. Now suspecting igniter:

1. Remove burner compartment door to gain access to the ignitor.
2. Disconnect the ignitor from the Ignition Control.
3. Using an ohmmeter measure the resistance of the ignitor.
4. Ignitor cool should read between 40 to 75 ohms.
5. Reconnect ignitor.
6. Place unit in heating cycle, measure current draw of ignitor during preheat cycle. Should read approximately 4 to 4.5 amps.
7. If ignitor is receiving 115 Volts and will not light, replace.
8. After check and/or replacement of hot surface ignitor, reinstall burner compartment door and verify proper unit operation.

Supposed to be 40-75 ohmns, showing infinite. That seems like the problem. Looks like they’re about $20. Now to go out and find one.

[Update a while later]

OK, a replacement (and improved version) was $42 bucks. The old one had clearly failed; you could see the burn through in the element that had opened it up. It probably got hit by a piece of dust or something when it was hot. House is now warming up.

[Update a while later]

Temp is up to 64 degrees and rising. In retrospect, I would have saved time if I’d relied on Occam: If something isn’t igniting, first check to see if there’s ignition.

Further thoughts: Pilotless ignition saves fuel, and is probably more reliable, but if a pilot blows out, it doesn’t cost $40+ to relight it.

Anyway, I understand my furnace much better now. It was the first time since we had it installed a dozen years ago that I’d opened it up to see how it works.

Business, Economics, Law, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Global Warming Movement

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Is it on the verge of collapse?

We can only hope so.

[Afternoon update]

The latest climate conspiracy theory. Tough words from Professor Curry:

Get over it, your side lost. Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.

Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.

Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.

Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on conflicting signals from the Trump administration. Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.

Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems. The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.

I repeat: We can only hope so. But “behave like a scientist” seems to be beyond many of them.

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The “Consensus” On Climate Change

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Scott Adams explains why he accepts it, even though it’s probably wrong:

when it comes to pattern recognition, I see the climate science skeptics within the scientific community as being similar to Shy Trump Supporters. The fact that a majority of scientists agree with climate science either means the evidence is one-sided or the social/economic pressures are high. And as we can plainly see, the cost of disagreeing with climate science is unreasonably high if you are a scientist.

While it is true that a scientist can become famous and make a big difference by bucking conventional wisdom and proving a new theory, anything short of total certainty would make that a suicide mission. And climate science doesn’t provide the option of total certainty.

To put it another way, it would be easy for a physicist to buck the majority by showing that her math worked. Math is math. But if your science depends on human judgement to decide which measurements to include and which ones to “tune,” you don’t have that option. Being a rebel theoretical physicist is relatively easy if your numbers add up. But being a rebel climate scientist is just plain stupid. So don’t expect to see many of the latter. Scientists can often be wrong, but rarely are they stupid.

…I accept the consensus of climate science experts when they say that climate science is real and accurate. But I do that to protect my reputation and my income. I have no way to evaluate the work of scientists.

If you ask me how scared I am of climate changes ruining the planet, I have to say it is near the bottom of my worries. If science is right, and the danger is real, we’ll find ways to scrub the atmosphere as needed. We always find ways to avoid slow-moving dangers. And if the risk of climate change isn’t real, I will say I knew it all along because climate science matches all of the criteria for a mass hallucination by experts.

It does indeed.

[Late-evening update]

The Scott Adams post was via Judith Curry, who has related links from other “heretics” (i.e., they “believe” in AGW, but aren’t hysterical about it) Roger Pielke and Matt Ridley:

The truly astonishing thing about all this is how little climate heretics – such as myself, Roger Pielke, and Matt Ridley – actually diverge from the consensus science position: RP Jr. hews strictly to the IPCC consensus; Matt Ridley is on the lukewarm side of the IPCC consensus, and I have stated that the uncertainties are too large to justify high confidence in the consensus statements.

RP Jr and Matt Ridley provide appalling examples of the personal and arguably unethical attacks from other scientists, journalists, elected politicians and others with government appointments.

Scott Adams provides some genuine (and as always, humorous) insights into the psychology behind the dynamics of the climate debate.

As to the question: to be or not to be a climate heretic?

I’m planning a climate heretic blog post shortly after the first of the year. After seeing RP Jr’s title, perhaps I will title it ‘Happy Heretic’ (stay tuned). Here’s to hoping that the Age of Trump will herald the demise of climate change dogma and acceptance of a broader range of perspectives on climate science and our policy options .

I’ll personally be looking forward to it.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Father Of Global Warming

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…dials back the alarm:

What a difference a few months make!

Just in time for holiday season, and for the Trump Administration, the father of the climate alarm, formerly a climate scientist with NASA/GISS, and now a full-time scientist/activist, has ameliorated his grand climate alarm. The 10-year ultimatum announced in 2006, made more dire in 2009 and since, is now moderated.

This October, we were told that the net emissions of of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must go negative. Now, “we don’t need to instantaneously reduce GHG amounts.”

A climate scientist might want to see Dr. Hansen’s math and model simulation to understand the revision in the last sixty days.

Maybe the climate can survive Donald Trump after all!

He’ll probably kill us all some other way.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Evolution

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No, not the theory, the software. Is there some good reason why it won’t synchronize with an IMAP server? I have this crazy idea that if email gets marked as junk locally, it should be removed from the inbox on the server, but it doesn’t happen. I don’t see it in the local inbox, but if I look at the server with roundcube, it’s all still there, and I have to manually remove it. The only thing I can find in a search to deal with it is to use offlineimap to synch, and point Evolution at the local files. But that seems like a PITA to set up. Why does this have to be so hard?

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Trump, And Climate

24 Comments

Thoughts from Judith Curry. tl;dr He’s not crazy:

In my post Trumping the elites, I stated that Trump’s election provided an opportunity for a more rational energy and climate policy. Many in the blog comments and the twitosphere found this to be an incomprehensible statement.

Here is what I think needs to be done, and I do see opportunities for these in a Trump administration:

  • a review of climate science that includes a faithful and transparent representation of uncertainties in 21st century projections of global and regional climate change
  • reopening of the ‘endangerment’ issue, as to whether warming is ‘dangerous’
  • a do-over on assessing the social cost of carbon, that accounts for full uncertainty in the climate model simulations, the integrated assessment models and their inputs.
  • support funding for Earth observing systems (satellite, surface, ocean) and research on natural climate variability.

Even if politics are to ‘trump’ the conclusions of these analyses, it would be clear that the Trump administration has done its due diligence on this issue in terms of gathering and assessing information. If the Trump administration were to accomplish the first 3 items, they might have a scientifically and economically defensible basis for pulling out of the Paris agreement and canceling Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

I noted the other day on Twitter that if Myron is the new EPA administrator, we’ll finally have one who is not a rabid environmentalist, and will follow the law, doing actual cost/benefit analyses. As a bonus, many EPA employees may quit (though it’s unclear if they have any marketable skills outside of government).