The climate debate has an epistemological problem that proponents of policy to deal with it want to pretend doesn’t exist. I wrote about the flawed precautionary principle years ago.
Category Archives: Mathematics
Climate
What is the import of Lorenz? Literally ALL of our collective data on historic “global atmospheric temperature” are known to be inaccurate to at least +/- 0.1 degrees C. No matter what initial value the dedicated people at NCAR/UCAR enter into the CESM for global atmospheric temperature, it will differ from reality (from actuality – the number that would be correct if it were possible to produce such a number) by many, many orders of magnitude greater than the one/one-trillionth of a degree difference used to initialize these 30 runs in the CESM-Large Ensemble. Does this really matter? In my opinion, it does not matter. It is easy to see that the tiniest of differences, even in a just one single initial value, produce 50-year projections that are as different from one another as is possible(see endnote 1). I do not know how many initial conditions values have to be entered to initialize the CESM – but certainly it is more than one. How much more different would the projections be if each of the initial values were altered, even just slightly?
This has always been pretty obvious to me. What does it mean? That we cannot model it into the future with any confidence whatsoever.
The Global Oil Surplus
But, but…PEAK OIL!
I predict that the wealth generated by cheap fossil energy will vastly exceed the costs of mitigating changes in climate, regardless of their cause.
Natural Selection
Just one more reason to not take climate hysteria seriously.
Hacker-Proof Code
…through formal software verification. This seems like sort of a big deal. Particularly in the era of the Internet of Things and self-driving cars. Of course, the weakest link in security will remain the flawed unit between the seat and the keyboard.
Microsoft’s Cancer Cure
Derek Lowe isn’t impressed.
@Rand_Simberg @Dereklowe @Eaterofsun Maybe they could just install Windows 10 into the tumors?
— Tech_Noir (@LV__666) September 21, 2016
XKCD And Climate
I’m generally a big fan of Randall Monroe, but I thought his latest was a misfire. This is a more accurate take.
The Reactionless Drive
Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s actually test it in space.
It’s worth noting that the cubesat revolution has made such things affordable.
California’s Pension Bomb
As I’ve often said, you can get a federal bailout, or remain a huge state. Those would be my conditions.
“Black Lives Matter”
Heather McDonald writes about the myths of the movement:
For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.
The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.
Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.
Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that blacks make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighborhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by blacks. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there.
Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force.
The Ferguson Effect is going to make life much worse in the black communities.
[Update a while later]
“Black Lives Matter is acting like a racist hate group. You can only imagine how the press would treat Tea Partiers or Trump supporters who acted this way.”
Yes. Oh, and hey remember those New Black Panthers that Eric Holder let off the hook after the case had been essentially won?
[Update a few minutes later]
The Justice Department laughed off the armed New Black Panther Party threat.
The administration also called ISIS the “Jayvee team.”