This article appears to have the physics right, but the spelling isn’t so great. No, the car doesn’t “loose” speed.
Category Archives: Mathematics
Simplicity On Complexity
Is climate linear or non-linear? As she says, this is the heart of the scientific debate. But even if it can be modeled as linear, we still don’t understand enough about the interactions to model it with confidence.
Space Is Really Really Empty
A scale map of the solar system, with the moon as a single pixel.
The New Math
Sorry, this seems like a ridiculous way to do subtraction (particularly for that problem which is trivially easy). And I can’t imagine how I’d do it in my head. Borrowing seems a lot easier to me.
The Pause
Causes and implications of it.
The biggest implication is that the models are worse than useless as a guide to policy on climate. And places like California are taking a wrecking ball to their economy for nothing.
The Fall Of The Software Commons
…is a myth. Eric Raymond on the history of open source, and the ahistorical knowledge of young programmers.
A Climate Skeptic
The thought experiment that made him one:
I think any physical scientist should be extremely skeptical that a long-term stable system is dominated by positive feedback. Systems dominated by positive feedback — and we are talking about incredibly high implied feedback percentages to get to these catastrophic forecasts — don’t tend to be very stable, but it is Michael Mann himself who has argued over and over with his hockey stick chart that past temperatures have only varied in very narrow ranges for thousands of years. Not the behavior one would expect of a system dominated by strong positive feedbacks.
To me, this thought experiment demonstrated that it was more likely that net climate feedbacks were zero or even negative (if only half of past warming was due to man, and half due to nature, it would imply a sensitivity around 0.7C). In either case, the resultant warming would be far from catastrophic. To believe the IPCC forecasts, one would have to believe there were either really long time delays, or natural and manmade cooling factors off-setting the warming. These have all been debated and I won’t go into them today, but I didn’t find the higher forecasts of 5-10C to be at all credible.
I don’t, either.
The Fossil Record
…doesn’t have a daily box score.
This is something that creationists don’t understand.
The Farmer’s Almanac
…is more reliable than the climate models.
No surprise here. The climate models are crap.
The Tree-Ring Circus
…may be the costliest show on earth.
A good review of the “investigations” that have “exonerated” climate scientists.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related thoughts from Mark Steyn on the projection of the True Believers, and devotees to “the cause.”
“A debate where none should exist”. Why shouldn’t it exist? And, if it’s “infected” the national legislature of the global superpower and leading media outlets, what makes it the view of “a fringe minority” other than that you label it as such? Why does Mann’s definition of “anti-science” now embrace not just know-nothing blowhards like yours truly but also scientists such as Judith Curry, Richard Muller, Richard Lindzen, etc? Garth Paltridge was Australia’s chief atmospheric research scientist but because he disagrees with Big Climate alarmism, a man who has devoted his life to science is suddenly “anti-science”? And to enforcers like Dr Mann this is all so obvious that no debate “should exist” – or be permitted to exist.
You should always listen carefully when someone is telling you to shut up – whether it’s the Organization for Islamic Co-Operation demanding an international law against “blasphemy”, or Michael Mann demanding that his own cult can likewise not be questioned.
Yup.