…have been falsified.
I’m not surprised. They don’t know WTF they’re doing. As I’ve said before, climate modeling is an interesting exercise, but it’s insane to base policy on it.
…have been falsified.
I’m not surprised. They don’t know WTF they’re doing. As I’ve said before, climate modeling is an interesting exercise, but it’s insane to base policy on it.
A new technique for communication. The good thing is that you probably don’t even have to be good at math. Just the attempt to solve the problem would create the desired response. Being in this state is one of my nightmares. Hard to know if it would be preferable to death, but this technique may allow us to find out for some individuals.
[Via Geek Press]
Here’s an article at the WaPo about it. This isn’t correct, though:
It is always desirable to launch to the east to capitalize on the direction of the Earth’s spin. The Earth travels about 1,000 mph west to east at the equator; you need to reach a speed of 17,000 mph to get to low-Earth orbit, so there’s no point in penalizing yourself 1,000 mph by heading in the wrong direction.
No, not “always.” Only for low-inclination orbits. For very high inclination, or retrograde, it’s actually preferable to launch from a high latitude (ideally, for a retrograde orbit, you’d like to launch from a pole, to eliminate any earth rotation, because it’s rotating in the wrong direction).
This sort of thing is why we don’t want economic illiterates in charge of the economy. Hey, morons. Don’t you think that if McDonalds could just raise their prices (and hence revenues) by 17% (actually 26%), they’d have already done that?
[Update a while later]
Let’s say McDonald’s decided to double all its salaries, so that the entry-level wage became $16 an hour instead of $8 an hour. Why would McDonald’s continue to employ their $8 an hour workers when instead they could hire “better” workers who are worth more? (And those of you who think that the skills, linguistic abilities, experience, intelligence, etc. of fast-food workers makes no difference in service don’t eat in McDonald’s much.)
Again, this is why you don’t want people making policy who don’t understand how business works. And this administration (and sadly, Congress, of both parties, but much more so among the Democrats) is full of such people.
Here are some amazing photorealistic CGI renderings.
[Via Geek Press]
They have to start adjusting their prognostications now, or risk looking more and more like fools when reality continues to get more and more out of line with the models.
On the verge of failure.
It’s an interesting exercise to attempt to model climate, but the notion that we should base public policy on these toys, particularly given the incompetence of many of those doing it, is insane.
[Update a while later]
It’s worth quoting the conclusions here:
It is impossible to present reliable future projections from a collection of climate models which generally cannot simulate observed change. As a consequence, we recommend that unless/until the collection of climate models can be demonstrated to accurately capture observed characteristics of known climate changes, policymakers should avoid basing any decisions upon projections made from them. Further, those policies which have already be established using projections from these climate models should be revisited.
Assessments which suffer from the inclusion of unreliable climate model projections include those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program (including the draft of their most recent National Climate Assessment). Policies which are based upon such assessments include those established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pertaining to the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
In other words, all of the president’s latest job- and wealth-destroying power grab.
[Update a few minutes later[
Failure deniers– the problem with public-sector science:
Private companies which kill products or ideas administer the pain quickly and move on. If government ever tries to end a program or operation — “ever” is the operative word, as Ronald Reagan frequently noted: ”The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program” — they go about it slowly, in hopes that outraged politicians or constituents will come to their rescue. If total termination ever occurs, they call it “a learning experience,” which of course was carried out with other people’s money, and rarely includes any learning.
Because they can do it with other peoples’ money. Time to take their (that is, our) money away.
I see a problem with this approach, I think, unless I’m missing something:
1. Are global temperatures warming?
2. Do the negative consequences of the change outweigh the positive consequences?
3. Can we do anything that will reverse the change?
4. Do the positive consequences of the action outweigh the negative consequences of doing nothing?Notice, the steps have nothing at all whatsoever to do with whether or not global warming is anthropogenic. The climate’s “naturalness” is actually irrelevant. If a 10 kilometer-wide asteroid were hurling toward earth at 100,000 km per hour, it would be a completely natural event. However, just because the meteor wasn’t anthropogenic doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t take actions to deflect it.
Notice also, that we could change question 1 from “warming” to “cooling” and the four-step approach still works. And quite frankly, cooling is probably a more historically problematic situation.
If the answer to any one of the above four questions is “No,” then we should do absolutely nothing about a changing climate. If the answer to all of the questions are “Yes,” then, and only then, should we take any actions.
The first problem is in step 3. It doesn’t seem to account for cost. Suppose there is something that we can do (at least in theory) to reverse the change, but it would result in the loss of (say) a quadrillion dollars in global economic growth over the next century. And that points out the problem with Step 4. Rather than comparing the positive aspects of the action to the negative consequences of doing nothing, we need to compare the positive consequences of the action to their cost. For example, Wikipedia (FWIW) says that the gross world product is about seventy trillion dollars. If we were to get a growth rate of 4 percent over a century, that would mean that in 2113, the GWP would be (1.04)**(100), or about fifty times that amount, or about 3.5 quadrillion dollars. If by arbitrarily making energy more expensive with carbon taxes or caps, we were to reduce that growth rate by a mere half a percent (which is probably a conservative estimate — many of the proposals would do much more economic damage), that would reduce the factor of growth after a hundred years to about thirty, instead of fifty. That is, the world would be 20 times seventy, or 1.4 quadrillion dollars poorer over that period of time. You can buy a lot of mitigation against climate issues with that kind of money.
This is the kind of rational analysis that Bjørn Lomberg has been doing, and it’s why we need a real regret analysis.
I’m trying to write a script to consolidate my book index, and I’ve run into a problem that’s driving me nuts. Can anyone see what’s going on here?
Here’s the relevant code:
if ($pagenumber) { #6
$numbers = $_;
$i = 0;
foreach (@numberarray) {
$numberarray[$i] = “”;
$i = $i + 1;
} # End foreach
$i = 0;
foreach (@sorted_numbers) {
$sorted_numbers[$i] = “”;
$i = $i + 1;
} # End foreach
$i = 0;
print $DEBUG2 “\$numbers is $numbers before entering while.\n”;
while ($numbers =~ /(\d+)(.*)/) {
print $DEBUG2 “\$1 is |$1|, \$pagenumber is |$pagenumber|.\n”;
if (!($1 eq $pagenumber)) {
$numberarray[$i] = $1;
$i = $i + 1;
} # End if
print $DEBUG2 “In while loop, \$numberarray[$i] is $numberarray[$i].\n”;
$numbers = $2;
print $DEBUG2 “Point 10: \$numbers is $numbers, \$i is |$i|.\n”;
} # End while
$numberarray[$i] = $pagenumber;
print $DEBUG2 “After while loop, \$numberarray[$i] is |$numberarray[$i]|, \$sorted_numbers[$i] is |$sorted_numbers[$i]|\n”;
@sorted_numbers = sort { $a <=> $b } @numberarray;
@numberarray = @sorted_numbers;
print $DEBUG2 “After sort, \$sorted_numbers[$i] is |$sorted_numbers[$i]|.\n”;
print $DEBUG2 “After sort \@numberarray is @numberarray, \$numberarray[$i] is $numberarray[$i].\n”;
$i = 0;
print $DEBUG2 “About to enter foreach (\@sorted_numbers).\n”;
$next = $i + 1; #Just for diagnostics
print $DEBUG2 “Before foreach, \$totalname is |$totalname|, \$numberarray[$i] is |$numberarray[$next]|, \$numberarray[$next] is |$numberarray[$i+1]|.\n”;
foreach (@numberarray) {
print $DEBUG2 “Got inside the loop.\n”;
print $DEBUG2 “**\$totalname is $totalname for \$i = $i.\n”;
$totalname = $totalname . ” ” . “$numberarray[$i],”;
$i = $i + 1;
}
print $DEBUG2 “Before chop condition, \$totalname is $totalname.\n”;
if ($totalname =~ /.*\,$/) {chop $totalname}
print $DEBUG2 “After chop condition, \$totalname is $totalname.\n”;
And here’s the debug output, for two different cases. One works, the other doesn’t and I can’t figure out what’s happening, but whatever it is, it seems to be happening in the sort. They should both give similar output — the name and a single page number, but as you can see, they don’t.
CASE 1
$numbers is Michael Adams 19, before entering while.
$1 is |19|, $pagenumber is |19|.
In while loop, $numberarray[0] is .
Point 10: $numbers is ,, $i is |0|.
After while loop, $numberarray[0] is |19|, $sorted_numbers[0] is ||
$sorted_numbers[0] is |19|.
after exiting @numberarray is 19, $numberarray[0] is 19.
About to enter foreach (@sorted_numbers).
Before foreach, $totalname is |Adams, Michael|, $numberarray[0] is ||, $numberarray[1] is ||.
Got inside the loop.
**$totalname is Adams, Michael for $i = 0.
Before chop condition, $totalname is Adams, Michael 19,.
After chop condition, $totalname is Adams, Michael 19.
CASE 2
$numbers is Bill Anders 26, before entering while.
$1 is |26|, $pagenumber is |26|.
In while loop, $numberarray[0] is .
Point 10: $numbers is ,, $i is |0|.
After while loop, $numberarray[0] is |26|, $sorted_numbers[0] is ||
$sorted_numbers[0] is ||.
after exiting @numberarray is 26, $numberarray[0] is .
About to enter foreach (@sorted_numbers).
Before foreach, $totalname is |Anders, Bill|, $numberarray[0] is ||, $numberarray[1] is ||.
Got inside the loop.
**$totalname is Anders, Bill for $i = 0.
Got inside the loop.
**$totalname is Anders, Bill , for $i = 1.
Got inside the loop.
**$totalname is Anders, Bill , , for $i = 2.
Before chop condition, $totalname is Anders, Bill , , 26,.
After chop condition, $totalname is Anders, Bill , , 26.
…are getting worse than we thought:
The author hypothesizes the reasons for this are that attempts in the latest generation of models to reproduce observed changes in Arctic sea ice are causing “significant and widening discrepancy between the modeled and observed warming rates outside of the Arctic,” i.e. they have improved Arctic simulation at the expense of poorly simulating the rest of the globe.
It continues to amaze me that so many supposedly smart people take this junk science seriously. You know what this stuff looks more and more like to me? Epicycles.