In light of my being incapacitated with terror, I’ll just leave you all with a bunch of links / thoughts that you might be interested in.
1) Via Stop the ACLU, two arrested in series of Alabama church fires:
Ben Moseley, 19, and Russell Debusk were taken into custody early Wednesday, officials said, and charged with conspiracy and individual counts in the arsons at five Bibb County churches and four in west Alabama.
A third suspect is still being sought.
Police said they did not receive any tips to lead to the arrest and that it was due to “old-fashioned police work.”
2) Terry Hastings emails, “I do not know how much clout the National Council for Social Studies has within the education community, but if the Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education are any indication, the cancer of identity politics is firmly established within our public school system. You can see them here. Do such guidelines objectively ennable the Jay Bennishes of the education world?
3) Charles Martin points to an American Thinker essay noting that global warming results have problems.” Writes Charles:
[…] Stockwell has shown that the same statistical process that produced the famous “hockey stick” of global temperatures will produce a hockey stick *even if* all it’s given as data is random numbers (“red noise”).
4) Via Allah, Islam, free speech, and the Other (see update here)
5) Neil emails me with what he notes are nearly toxic levels of BDS emanating from this latest by the New Yorkers’s Hendrik Hertzberg (“Talk of the Town”). Quips Neil:
There ought to be an award for condensing all the DNC talking points into a
readable narrative of less than 1,200 words.
To me, Nancy Pelosi is the living monument to that idea.
6) Craig Caughman is impressed with Rumsfeld—at least, with how he comes across in the transcript.
7) AJ Strata reviews an Atlantic Monthly article by James Bamford on the NSA/FISA controversy and notes a host of factual errors.
8) Karol Sheinin notes that the NRA is suing Mayor Nagin of NO.
9) Most skin cancers are treatable. Sadly, some are deadly. Perhaps this explains the slight pinch I feel under my left arm from time to time. There’s a lymph node there, I’m pretty sure.
Have a pleasant day!
<a href=”I don’t want a brain operation.” target=”_blank”>I’m dying! I know it!</a> There’s a spot on my lungs!
Take it easy. It’s not on your lungs. It’s on your ear.
It’s the same thing, isn’t it?
I can’t sleep. God, there’s a tumor in my head the size of a basketball.
I keep thinking I can feel it every time I blink…
I don’t want a brain operation. I’ll wind up like the guy with the wool cap who delivers for the florist.
Seriously: hope it all turns out well, Jeff.
Hrmph. Well, I certainly made a grotesque hash of that.
Something shocking: New York Times reporter Matthew Wald has been caught making up a crucial and embarrassing quote attributed to a Southwest Airlines pilot. At the end of his story “Nothing but Gray Skies…” he quotes a SWA pilot’s union safety chairman, Jeff Hefner: “
… Not everyone agrees that the longer working schedule is a problem. “It’s hard for me to feel sorry for them,” said Jeffrey Hefner, the safety chairman of the union that represents pilots at Southwest Airlines, who have always flown longer hours than pilots at older airlines.
“They’re a bunch of spoiled brats,” he said. “Historically, this has been a really cushy job once you get to the majors. You make a lot of money, and you don’t have to fly a lot. But there had to be a market balancing at some point.” …
The union and Hefner have put out a statement saying that not only did that conversation never occur, but that Hefner has never spoken to Wald.
(next post)
Screw Ray Nagin.
Whiner!
A real man would simply rip the offending lymph node out with his teeth and bandage the wound with an old USMC t-shirt.
SB: lived
yeah, he
SOUTHWEST AIRLINES
Pilots’ Association
March 7, 2006
Captain Duane E. Woerth, President, ALPA
535 Herndon Parkway Herndon, VA 20170
Dear Duane,
On Monday, March 6 an article authored by Matthew Wald, New York Times writer, quoted a Southwest Airlines’ pilot in an article entitled “Nothing but Gray Skies “ After speaking to the reporter personally on at least two occasions today and speaking to the pilot who was “quoted” in the article I’m confident the reporter for some unknown reason included inaccurate and unsubstantiated comments attributed to a Southwest Airlines’ pilot.
1. When asked several times today, the reporter could not recall specifically the time and place he allegedly interviewed the Southwest Airlines’ pilot.. He was asked in very specific terms and was given several opportunities to confirm the precise comments he created to the pilot. He could not confirm they occurred as printed.
2. The reporter did call SWAPA for a comment in late .January in regards to another topic. He spoke to a SWAPA staff member who has a record of the call,. No information was passed to the reporter other than an acknowledgement of his request for information that would be passed to the appropriate individuals.
3 The reporter stated he was given the pilot’s name by a SWAPA staff member, however the SWAPA staff’ member confirmed this did not occur. It is the policy of SWAPA to never release the name of members to outside agencies; this includes the press.
4 The Captain involved was never interviewed by this reporter in regards to this story The Captain categorically denies the statements attributed to him.
The press can be your friend; however in this case Mr. Wald got it wrong. The alleged quotes reported by Mr. Wald in no way reflect the views or opinions of the Southwest Airlines’ pilots SWAPA appreciates what all pilots have sacrificed to save their airlines and works cooperatively on many levels with ALPA, APA and all professional pilot organizations. SWAPA is contacting the paper to request a retraction and is pursuing other avenues to correct the inaccurate reporting which occurred
Best regards,
Joseph “Ike” Eichelkraut President, SWAPA
Brookview Plaza 0 1450 Empire Central Dr Suite 737 0 Dallas TX 75247
Phone: 214..xxxxxxx • Tollfree: 800-xxxxxxxx . Fax: 214-xxxxxxx s www swapa org
Screw Matthew Wald too.
And Jeff’s mole. Screw the mole.
Jeff— Serious: If the doc proposes to do that thang where he destroys them with electric zaps, go for it: it doesn’t hurt (much), and it’s one less thing to worry about later in life.
interesting comment in the Rumsfeld remarks about “dealing with illegal militias”. Maybe I just don’t read the breifing reports regularly, but isn’t that a shift off of simply “foreign insurgents”, “former regiem elements”, and the”dissaffected other” categories? Is Rumsfeld hinting that a more coordinated effort to enervate the power of Al-Sadr and the Iranian supported militas in the Southeast of Iraq?
Melanoma is most prevalent in fair haired-light skinned people. I have a friend who has been fighting it for 5 years.
Also, the warning signs are bleeding, or changes in appearance. Usually, people catch these things early.
Hmmm.
I find myself looking far more attractive in the mornings. Sufficiently so that I’m shocked into a blissful silence.
Should I be worried?
Lucky you Ed, I keep the mirror covered with burlap until at least noon.
I’ve removed all mirrors from my house so that the rude man on the other side doesn’t steal my soul. Sometimes I miss him because he was a rather handsome fellow, but thank G-d you can’t smell through a mirror.
I look most attractive at night when I get up at 3am to go to the bathroom, and I happen to glance over at the mirror, which shows my image faintly illuminated by the soft green glow of the nightlight my wife keeps plugged in above her vanity; and I think, “Damn… not bad.”
They’re not independent and random. He picked numbers that were correlated with the hockey stick—so of course that would match. He also modelled the numbers with some time dependence: so that once out of the hockey stick area the numbers would grow more and more random. of course this gives us what we want: a hockey stick at the end and a beggining that looks random.
Actus, the Hockey Team picked proxies that correlated with a hockey stick. They’ve admitted to this in public. He used the same process.
But they weren’t random data. The hockey team picked things that correlate with known measurement to avoid picking random things. To double check the proxyness. This guy makes a process that will revert to the mean over time, but has the capability to sometimes produce a time series that matches the hockey stick. He then tosses everything that doesn’t match the hockey stick. All this shows is that its possible to make LTP random data that sometimes has a hockey stick
Actually, actus, its been shown that the process that the Hockey Team used produces a hockey stick with any data given it.
But you are almost admitting that you know that the Hockey Team is cherry picking their data. In fact, they’ve admitted it in public as I said, at a recent conference one of them even had a slide that read “You have to cherry pick if you want to make cherry pie”.
The whole basis for the claim that modern warming is unprecedented in recent millenia has been shown to be junk science.
Not with any data. With LTP random data that discards things which do not correlate with the hockey stick. At the link:
Its been shown that the hockey stick will be produced by data that discards things that aren’t hockey sticks. I say, Science, again!!
The link says this is analogous to only using tree ring data that correlates with surface temperatures. But the problem is the analogy doesn’t extend: he’s purpusefully built a model that will sometimes have time-correlations but will over the long run (more than a few hundred years) be random. Thats what he says in the next sentence.
They need to find proxies that match known temperatures observations. In order to do that, they match known temperature observations to several proxies. It is in the period of known observations that the hockey stick happens. What other way can be used to find proxies?
Of course. They can’t use proxies that don’t actually proxy the known temperature data.
So, actus, your statistics background is what, exactly?
Or are you just being your priggish self again, desperately conforming to the orthodoxy of your social class?
How screwy does your data have to be to produce an actus-shaped post?
Ross McKitrick, What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About?, pg. 12
I once met a guy who programmed the Mann equations into Exel. (Yes, it can be done. Yes, it ran like a drugged dog. Yes, he was showing off his mad skilz.)
The best “hockey stick” we got was from entering the last four digits of the numbers on a randomly selected page (somewhere in the upper 300s, IIRC) of the Toronto phone directory.
Those Canadians are f*ed, let me tell you.
Regards,
Ric
tw: North to Alaska, go north, the melt is on…
Muhahahahahahahaha
I don’t know much about hockey sticks, but if you can’t give Actus points for linking to a StrongBad e-mail…then maybe the left is right. And up is down.
Good luck with the lymph node. I had that too back in April (let’s see if the link works this time). It turned out it was an immune reaction to a boil (wow, the immune system suffers under stress – who knew), combined with bruising from some indelicate prodding from the nurse.
My advice: when she looks for moles on Mr Fireman, don’t ask her to run her fingers over it “just to be sure there’s not a hidden lump”, and especially don’t wink.
– Damn. Why didn’t you say something three kids ago.
– I preffered the “freeze” approach over the electric, but whatever floats your clock….
– Statistical rule #43: “All actus posts must be made using random noise data points.”*
*(carefully selected from the worn black plastic handle wrapping of used hockey sticks.)
A math major with about 6 semesters worth of stat classes, 2 years work with statistics models of the nervous system, and a peer reviewed publication of a model using a stochastic process.
But you don’t need anything like that to understand this argument. Just to know the concepts: that you have to fit proxies to the surface temperature data in order to determine if they’re good proxies. That if you have a random series with long-term trends, they might sometimes fit the surface temp data, but they’ll eventually mean revert.
Hertzberg is amazing. Not only did he condense the talking points but he was sure to include at least one inaccuracy that anyone with knowledge of hunting knows is total bullshit.
The dove they were hunting are far from pen fed and freed for the last hours of their lives. Mr. Hertzberg could learn to wield a shotgun and try his abilities against these birds. He would look just as big a fool in the field as he does in the newspaper.
– I’ve said this before actus, regarding the whole “global yeehaw” nonsense, which may for all we know be perfectly true, but you, and none of my fellow scientists, the ones waving bedsheets at the aurora borealis, can possibly know. You’re looking at a few years of data from 8.2 million years (The generally accepted modern “cooling period”), and trying to draw specific measurable trends and conclusions. I can’t say you’re wrong. But thats the difference between us. I know that, and you don’t seem to.
– BTW. When you’re ready to predict the Illinois Lottery the next time it crests 365 million, give me a call. You’d have better odds at doing that ten times in a row than the sleaze you’re trying to sell with this garbage’.
Lottos are a tax on people that can’t do math. You’re not making a good criticism of a stat argument when you say that sort of thing.
Bingo. Both enterprises are a fools game. You can be taught. I’m proud of you actus.
You’re wrong. One is attempting to predict a random process. The other is using statistical correlations and extrapolations.
and an idiot. Didn’t you say you were going to ignore me? Better you keep that promise.
actus – If I did indeed ever call you an idiot I herewith take it back. But you’ve been shown a perfectly straightforward reason, logical in its basis, where the whole reason’ le paradigm of statistical analysis is being inveigled. So it should all be clear to you now, particularly if
you are as well versed in the subject as your presented bonofides would suggest. Extrapolation is fine, invaluable in point of fact. But taken beyond certain extremes becomes pure speculation.
– You know that. I know that. But. It wouldn’t support the “sky is falling” meme of the anti-industrial/capitalism numbnutz on the left. Science ceases to be science when you throw away the rules of the discipline. Maybe we’re poisoning the crap out of our environment. Maybe we’re not. Maybe the Sun’s slow contraction has a billion times the effect as anything we could ever do short of burning every combustible item on the planet at once. We simply don’t know.
– We should react with careful studied monitoring, and do what we can to lower pollution without destroying peoples lives if possible. Not go off half cocked because some well meaning, misguided worry warts have decided the end is near. That’s not science, its obsessive paranoid bullshit.
– The funny thing is I can think of far better arguments and ways to present your case that wouldn’t be nearly so easily knocked down. Fortunately I prefer common sense to crapola non-scientific grunge.
TW: ”who was dose guys….the ones with the funny hats…. Is it really true they can predict the end of the world”?
The point is I havent, and I know it, and your equation of this to predicting lottoes tells me you don’t.
How do you know when that extreme is reached?
I think you’re more concerned with arguing against that, and its clouding your view of the matter at hand.
-There are three main tests for statistical viability.
– Definable variable limits. (I can’t just plug any numbers in and get what I want/expect)
– Predictable generalization (The same sample would work no matter where I selected the points from, as long as I followed the same sampling rules)
– Acceptable error magnitude (A large enough sample that reduces the variance error to a predetermined acceptable limit.)
– From what I’ve seen of the numbers and the math, all three of those rules are broken with regularity in the presentations.
– But then I guess if I’m a scientist that just happens to be a Conservative, I just can’t possibly see the “nuance”. You know the more Liberals use that argument in general, the less likely you are to be taken seriously, But hey. Knock yourself out.
Most extrapolations have error bars and confidence intervals based on standard deviation, which expand according to your model and how far you get from your fitted data.
They don’t seem to be in this extrapolation in the pictures linked to. Addressing your 3 points: The numbers being plugged in are close to and within the range of the known surface temperature data, I don’t know about tree ring data that fits the known data but doesn’t extrapolate like the rest, and it doesn’t look like things are outside of variances, but we don’t have any error bars.
This isn’t an issue of nuance. I still think you’re arguing against liberals, rather than science.
– Well then actus, there you have it. If its Liberal science then it has to be correct by rote, which I assume you’re trying to argue too. My mindless dismissal of the science because its proposed by a Liberal. *cough*
– Erm. No. You said it yourself. But you’re not seeing it. You can’t have any confidence when you don’t have a variance model, and you can’t have a variance model without some predetermined limit range to begin with. Your sample is just too damn small to draw any firm conclusions.
– I’ll tell you the truth. I really wish we’d make some break throughs in stochastic “projection”, along with better error models. But we’re simply not there yet Sparky. You get an educated guess at best, and a total misreading at worst. You can hardly expect the entire Industrialized world to shut of the equipment and stop everything they’re doing based on that.
– I for one would love to be able to plan picnics on sunny warm days a few months ahead. Not to mention the possibilities in oranges futures.
I think he is too Actus. That’s obvious though, as you note, being that there’s no reputable science to argue against, there’s only liberals left. Right?
BBH doesn’t seem to be talking about what’s at the link or criticized by the link. He’s talking about ‘liberals’ and ‘nuance.’
Climate science in general? I don’t know much about it. I sometimes read realclimate.org, and it soudns convincing to me. Much more than this link.
How small? and how much more sample do you want?
That’s what a stochastic projection IS. It will never be otherwise, no matter what “breakthroughs” are made.
I think this is your problem, rather than the science.
actus – Listen. I don’t need to look at that link. I’ve looked at many others, and it always comes down to the same thing. You have a spike. Ok. Lets say its real. It most probably is in occurance, even if the actual magnitude is in error. The problem you have, the problem everyone has, when they go off on long range “projections” is that for all anyone knows a few 100,000 years ago there were 152 spikes just like it of even higher amplitude opver the same time period. At which point using the same flawed thinking we’d be nuts if we even thought about trying to populate this planet. Thats the problem. Other branches of science can help. Tree rings, Indigeonous plant/aminal life. Other physical clues. But in the end the data is just too sparse.
– Anyway thats my take as a scientist. When I see some new sources of much expanded data, I’ll break out the bomb shelter plans.
TW: plant. I said plant already…is there an echo in here?
Actus, the other thing that the Hockey Team has been caught hiding ( besides their actual data – in violation of every principle of scientific method ) is that their favorite proxies do not correlate to the last couple of decades of
temperature.
They’ve been caught hiding key measurements of statistical validity. They’ve been caught hiding their actual data. And they have been caught hiding the fact that the key proxy without which the entire “hockey stick” collapses is not a proxy for temperature but for precipitation.
The whole Hockey Stick is a fraud.
Thank you for talking about what I’m talking about.
I have no idea what the data or climate science says about 100 thousand years ago. The link doesn’t criticize that.
Isn’t tree ring data what the hockey stick is based on?
Sounds like we don’t need the work at the link at all.
atcus – I’m not arguing that someone, somewhere might find anomolies in weather data. Thats why I went directly to the “method”. You can find all the supposed “anomolies” you want to, and you still havn’t proven a thing. Because:
“We don’t know what the norm is with any accuracy over significant periods of time”.
– And thats all I care to discuss it because I’m repeating myself at this point.
– You learn early on in science that for every discovery of fire theres a large number of “cold fusion” fiasco’s. If what others are posting here concerning this “hockey stick” claim is true, then it falls in the cold fusion bin.
I’ll presume on BBH’s patience to say, well, d’oh!
Mann’s purpose—all but stated out loud, and certainly acknowledged by the climate “scientists” who gleefully accepted his data—was to make the Medieval Climate Optimum go away, because it’s (ahem!) inconvenient for the doomsayers. He therefore tinkered with the math and the data until he got something that would do that. The result he got, which does what he wanted, will also pull the graph he wanted out of most any random time series. I’ve seen it pull the “right” result from random number generators and, as I said above, a telephone directory. (Well, actually, I haven’t; I haven’t got the math. But I’ve watched people I trust get those results.)
To me, it seems like the net result is to confirm, rather strongly, the existence of a phenomenon that’s been known to historians and scientists for as long as either discipline has been practiced—that there is something strongly different about the weather in the period, roughly, 800-1100 CE compared to that of the times before and after, that the best short characterization of that period is “it was warmer then than before or after that”, and that this correlates with events found ‘round the world that might be influenced by climate. Furthermore there is skimpier data of another warm period, the Roman Warm, roughly a thousand years before that, and extremely sketchy indications of a couple of previous cycles, all with about the same period.
You can go on or not about the statistical and mathematical justifications for the technique, but if the graph says you can’t have grown barley in Greenland, or wine-grapes in Thuringia, in the year 1000; if it doesn’t account for Chaco Canyon (850-1250 CE, the last century showing slow decline), Machu Picchu (same chronology, opposite direction), any number of other historical references, the Roman Empire, and the Harappan Culture; then your math is either crap or an illustration of “liars can figure”. Possibly both.
BBH is trying to tell you how the lie was constructed. You’re telling him it was perfectly justified, and therefore that the ruins of farmhouses just now emerging from the glaciers don’t exist. Unfortunately I don’t have the scratch to go to Greenland, select a suitable clue-club, and come to DC to hit you with it.
Regards,
Ric
– Bzzzzzzzzzzz….I’ll take a “inland fresh water sea’s” for 500 Alex….
– What was the Sahara desert?…
….et cetera et cetera et cetera…..
Peak of Mississippian culture (Cahokia): 600 to 1400 CE; longer span of culture compared to Chaco probably to do being in a more hospitable base climate.
Peak of Hopewell/Adena culture: 800 BCE to 100 CE; corresponds to the Roman Warm Period
Peak of Poverty Point culture: 1700 BCE; roughly corresponds to Harappan Culture; well-known that northern Louisiana was much wetter than currently. What is now a valley beneath Poverty Point was at the time a lake/swamp.
It’s hard to get worked up over the purported dangers of climate change when stone-age cultures flourished under the same conditions. The Poverty Point culture had no domestic crops, no domestic animals, and no fired pottery, yet had a permanent settlement with a population in the thousands.
Is there any evidence the ACLU may have been involved in setting these fires? Else why is Stop the ACLU covering it so closely. Personally, I wouldn’t put it past them.
– BP world, in conjunction with the UAE, just announced it would select an American entity for port “leases†only. That changes the equation so completely that Schumer just stuttered his way through his appearence on the floor, not knowing exactly how to respond, but obviously wanting to keep the whole kerfluffle alive.
– America is running an 8.5 billion dollar trade deficit at the moment. Its unsustainable without some sort of foriegn investments. I’m still waiting for the Democrats to stop yammering about “protecting American securityâ€Â, which seems to have become suddenly popular with the left after 6 years of trying to undermine all things important to security, and explain how additional isolationism is going to benefit the American economy.
– This will probably take the air out of the hoped for issue for the Dems, but the Republican Senators that were so easy to panic are looking pretty feckless themselves right now, since they allowed the Dems to demagogue the entire issue through the media, with no pushback. You can always tell when its an election year no matter which side of the aisle you’re looking at.
I’d still like to hear exactly why an increase in temperature and CO2 would be a bad thing.
It seems to me that historically periods with higher average temps and CO2 levels coincided with flourishing civilizations.
But you already said that.
I’d still like to hear exactly why an increase in temperature and CO2 would be a bad thing.
I would too. I live in Buffalo which is quite cold. We could certainly use a little global warming. And I try to do my part by driving an SUV
SUVEEEEIST!
Actus writes: “Isn’t tree ring data what the hockey stick is based on? “
Typical. Actus has been arguing about something without any actual knowledge of the topic. Not a clue.
In fact, actus, its been shown that when the bristlecone pine core proxy is removed, the entire hockey stick disappears. The scientists who originally collected the bristlecone pine cores say that they are not proxies of temperature but precipitation.
The Hockey Stick is a fraud.
– Maybe the problem is we’ve been debating over a “hot” hockey stick, when it was a “wet” hockey stick all along….
– Or maybe its a cold wet clue-bat hockey stick that actus needs hitting with….
BBH,
The whole thing, at its base, is about proxies and statistics. We don’t know what the temperature was at point X at regularly spaced points in the past, and we can’t go back and measure it. So we measure something we can measure—tree rings, oxygen isotopes, ice cores—and which responds to temperature changes. The real measure becomes the proxy for the one we want. [And you probably know all this; consider it a combination of arrogance and refreshing your memory.]
We all know that it’s always cooler when it’s raining, right? Therefore cooler temperatures mean more precipitation and better plant growth.
Bzzzzt! Wrong, or at least not +1.0 correlation. Higher temperatures mean more evaporation, more clouds, more precipitation (and more CO2), and better plant growth. Neither one of those notions is fully proven yet, but both are plausible at present, and the “warm=rain” one looks just slightly better.
So if you’re reading your tree-ring data as “more growth=cooler, less growth=warmer” you may have it precisely backwards. Your proxy for the temperature isn’t sufficient. It may even be inverted.
The real problem is that CO2 itself is being used as a proxy for all greenhouse gases. The actual contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is rather small—5 to 10% is the number I’ve seen, though I’ll welcome correction. The bulk of the greenhouse effect comes from water vapor, though hydrocarbons (methane, etc.) have a significant effect.
But water is extremely hard to model. It exists in three forms, all the transition temperatures are well within normal ranges, and the transitions are thermodynamically complex. Ever notice that it seems warmer when it’s snowing than when it’s clear? It isn’t your imagination. In order to become a snowflake, the water had to release heat. That heat warms the atmosphere. It really is warmer when it’s snowing. The same is true to a lesser degree of rain.
Worse yet, water has secondary effects. As vapor it’s transparent to visible light and opaque to IR, thus the greenhouse effect. As water droplets finely divided (clouds) it’s highly reflective at almost all wavelengths. As liquid water in pools it absorbs IR. As water absorbed in the soil it can go either way depending on soil type. As snow it’s highly reflective. So, for instance, an increase in temperature might increase evaporation, therefore cloud cover—which reduces heat absorption by reflecting it. Complicated and difficult, and not all the equations are well known.
Carbon dioxide has no such complexity. It’s always a gas, and always has the same transmissivity at the same wavelengths. It’s relatively easy to model, so the scientists use it, and assume that the rest of the greenhouse gases have a similar net effect. Some of that is honest; they only have so much computer power. But much of it is bandwagoning. Either way, it looks to me (and to the honest ones among climatologists) as if they’re oversimplifying by making Cheerful Charlie assumptions.
(Amusingly enough, it’s been recently discovered that even CO2 may not be as simple as assumed. It turns out forests transpire CO2 when they’re growing—opposite to the previous assumption. So warmer temperatures may increase CO2, rather than the other way round. Cool, eh?)
As for statistics—actus gave you justifications for the statistical analysis, and he’s quite correct, as you might expect from someone of his background. Trouble is, standard statistics may not be applicable. Statistics, and the mathematical structures that underpin it, are based on randomness, the assumption that sequential events aren’t correlated. There is a large and growing number of people who are convinced that real randomness, 0.0 correlations, is extremely rare. The term they use is “chaos”, and in the technical sense it means that something may be random only within a limited gamut. It isn’t ordered, but it isn’t random either, because all events aren’t equally probable; a narrow category is more probable than “random” and the rest of the possible occurrences are less probable.
In a chaotic situation standard statistical tests don’t work, because they’re based on distributions that have randomness at their base. Substitutes are becoming available, but slowly, both because it’s hard and because people like actus, “standard” statisticians relying on the existing laws, are skeptical of the new formulations and resist them. (And they may be right. But that isn’t clear yet.)
The weather and climate appear, at present, to be almost paradigmic examples of chaotic systems. Small causes can have large effects—the familiar Chinese Weather Butterfly, a fun reductio ad absurdum—and what seem like major drivers can have small, no, or opposite effects to what is expected. So if you see a “climate scientist” flinging chi, rho, and T-tests around like magic wands, be very suspicious. There may be a butterfly on his shoulder.
Granularity is also worth mentioning. The finest-grained model I know of currently uses three-degree “boxes”, takes a humongous computer to run (even by modern-day standards), and isn’t very well respected because it gives results quite different from the mainstream suites, most of which use 1024 or fewer zones to represent the whole earth. Never heard of NASTRAN, you say? I mentioned the same. Not applicable. The math is too complex. The woman who told me that sounded wistful…
Bottom line: at present, atmospheric modeling is pretty much a case of logging a game of D&D and trying to apply it to the real world. It’s useful work, because it’s the necessary preliminary to modeling that might actually be reliable, but taking it seriously—making, for instance, major policy decisions based on it—is trying to run the polity on conclusions based on a Nintendo game.
Regards,
Ric
Ric, best comment I’ve seen on a thread anywhere since before Christmas.
Bravo, sir. I learned something new today. Again. The conversation leading up to Ric’s comment was eminantly worthwhile, as well.
Ric – An elegant summery of the whole ball of wax, stated in much better words than I could muster. Thank goodness we can’t build true RNG’s, I’d never win at Keno!
– Seriously. Beats there an undergraduates heart that doesn’t dream of finding a strange attractor in every pile of psuedo-random data. I guess I have to much familiarity with the underpinnings and roots of several of the disciplines to be more starry eyed and less cynical. Among those piles, weather data does seem to come close to the choastic ideal. “But proxies is proxies, as they say, and all is models anyway….No matter how hard I figure and ply…I never get rid of Madam butterfly”.
– I’ll leave it at that, knowing you know I’ve read and understood. Thanks for the concise wrapup.
TW: ”Upon closer observation, Holmes realized it was indeed a red doorknob, and not a tomato after all….”
The Hockey Stick is a fraud.
There’s no sound science to support the idea that our actions are causing global warming. None. Just a lot of propaganda from left-wing scientists. It’s sad to see what a state modern science is in. All of the rigor of the old days is gone, having been replaced by looser, more relativistic standards. Sound science is all but dead, these days. You find better science in a typical Michael Crichton novel than you do in most issues of science journals.