Why I Don’t “Believe In Science”

Steve Sailer links to an article about ‘why we don’t believe science’, complaining of their token example of putative left-centered science disbelief (vaccines causing autism) is a far less obvious one than (something racial, I guess).

All fair enough, but what about the other examples. Like global warming. Are they even valid in the first place?

It appears to be taken for granted that belief in global warming-requiring-social-policy-overhaul is ‘science’, and lack of said belief is not. My problem with this is that the vast, vast majority of people who ‘believe in global warming’ know none of the science to speak of (and no, I don’t count muttering something about ‘carbon’ and being able to draw arrows going in a circle from the sky to the ground to the sky as ‘knowing the science’). Most such people – and this seems especially true of the vocal ones – did not come to this belief by studying the science, knowing the science, critically evaluating the science, questioning the science, or anything of the sort. Instead, they (most of them) essentially adopted the belief because people they trust and ally with politically believe in it.

Which is okay by itself to an extent, but it ain’t science, and people who form views this way don’t get to claim the science mantle. I would even go so far as to say that ‘believing in science’ itself is anti-science. True scientists don’t ‘believe in science’, they practice science (which is a very different activity) and provisionally accept what appears to be its latest best explanations (while remaining always ready to critique and find flaws in them).

This suggests a weaker and more careful way to phrase what (I guess) it’s implied we’re all meant to do, which is just to say that we’re supposed to provisionally accept the current best scientific explanations of our world. Maybe that’s what ‘believing in science’ is supposed to mean. Fine. The problem there, though, is that it’s just assumed by our self-anointed Defenders Of Science that ‘our best explanations’ of the climate all point towards greenhouse-gas-driven AGW. I say assumed because, again, they don’t actually know that. How could they, when (again) they don’t know the science?

Ultimately, the problem I have with Defender-Of-Science thinking is that it seems to absolve its adherents of any responsibility to actually know the science. Instead all they have to do is point to some Scientist saying something they found politically convenient and say ‘I believe him’. In this way, it’s completely anti-scientific and hinders actual progress in peoples’ scientific thought. It’s all well and good (and correct) to say that we can’t all be experts on the chaotic chemistry- and physics-driven equations that govern the oceano-atmospheric system, but this doesn’t make it okay to just walk around saying ‘I believe in science’. If you know jack squat about the science then you have no basis whatever for even knowing, let alone going around declaring, what ‘the science’ even says in the first place. In that context, what exactly is it that you are even ‘believing’?

This is particularly so for a topic that becomes politicized, as ‘global warming/climate change’ indisputably has. That’s how we get to a point where instead of rolling up sleeves and doing the gritty work themselves, one is meant only to ‘believe’ something that Al Gore told them Scientists Said. People who raise questions, critiques, and doubts – i.e., people who do the very things that scientists are supposed to do – are then branded as ‘not believing in science’.

Which is perfectly consistent, however, because like I said ‘believing in science’ is anti-scientific, and if that’s what you do, then that’s what you are. Personally, I don’t ‘believe in science’.

Sincere Question For “Keynesians”

I asked this in the preceding post but here’s a sincere question for all “Keynesians” who believe in “Keynesianism”, and who genuinely believe in something called “stimulus”:

Why wouldn’t a Moon Program count as “stimulus”? Why wouldn’t a Anything Program count as “stimulus”?

With a Moon Program, the government would be spending money. On something. And at least some of the money would conceivably be ultimately used to pay for some jobs. Isn’t that “stimulus”? As far as I can tell it meets all the criteria for being “stimulus” (let’s tick off the criteria: government spending money? – check; on something? – check; at least some jobs conceivably resulting? – check).

So then why is President Obama stupidly (and, perhaps worse, unkeynesianly) forcing through this giant anti-”stimulus” measure (scrapping the moon program)? I thought he, and you guys, totally believed in “stimulus”. Because of how seriously true and correct “Keynesianism” totally is. In particular, you all totally believe that (under certain vaguely-defined circumstances, i.e. if “there’s a crisis” or perhaps a “liquidity trap”) it’s an unalloyed good for the government to spend a wad of money. (On something.)

The Moon Program is something. Isn’t it?

Please help me understand. I know I’m not as reality-based and Scientific (and Keynesian) as all y’all who learned about “Keynesianism” in a Unit in your giant large-print economics textbook in your undergraduate econ class, but I’m trying. I want to understand. How can Obama be doing this, and going back on the utterly scientific and unquestionably correct “Keynesian” principles you all hold so dear? Why aren’t you crying out at this betrayal?

Instead of scrapping the Moon Program, shouldn’t we be getting more Moon Program? If there was a plan to go back to the Moon once, how about let’s plan to do it twice. Ten times! Better yet, let’s set up a Mars Program, a Jupiter Program, a Uranus Program, a Pluto Program while we’re at it.

Wouldn’t any of those count as “stimulus”? Which ones wouldn’t, and why not?

I know that the subtleties and intricacies of “Keynesianism” and “stimulus” are lost on a dummy like me. But at least give me some credit: I want to understand. I want to learn. I want to be a better, smarter person. Like all y’all “Keynesians”.

Why I’m Not Likely To Become A Trillionaire

Somewhere deep in a climate-change argument I got into with someone, I ended up coming up with the following, which I think nicely encapsulates the #1 problem I have with climate-change believers:

One effect in isolation is not sufficient to describe a multidimensional physical system.

Of course that one effect I’m talking about is ‘the greenhouse effect’. Because most climate-change believers think their case is made instantly just by pointing to the greenhouse effect. They think that’s all they need to do and they’re done. They are wrong.

Actually though, I do need to amend my principle slightly to the following:

One effect in isolation is not sufficient to describe a multidimensional physical system, unless it is shown that it is.

What we have are essentially a politicized army of self-anointed climate experts seeking to overhaul my life based on their third-grade-level Oral Report on “The Greenhouse Effect” complete with arrows drawn on their giant posterboard coming down from space, hitting the earth, and then bouncing/cycling up and down forever. This argument, such as it is, is based – almost as a matter of pride – on reducing the entire complex oceano-atmospheric-biosphere system governing the earth’s climate evolution to a completely one-dimensional story:

CO2 up, temperature up – CO2 down, temperature down

The climate, in all its glory and diversity, has only one single dimension in the view of these SCIENTIFIC GENIUSES WHO STAND ON THE SIDE OF SCIENCE. That dimension being ‘How much CO2 is there’. Oh, maybe they’ll admit that there’s more to it than that – but they really genuinely love telling only the one-dimensional story, don’t they? When push comes to shove, that’s the basis of their argument, is it not?

To give the example I use often: if one effect were always enough, then I could point to the fact that my bank account earns interest (“The Interest Effect”?) and automatically conclude that I’m going to be a trillionaire. To any doubters I’d just say: “It’s very simple. My bank account earns interest. Therefore each day it has more money in it than the day before. So, given enough time, this system is going to blow up to infinity. It will certainly surpass 1 trillion!” I could even make a giant poster-board with upward-pointing arrows about it and everything. All of which, of course, freely and stupidly ignores all other possible effects on the size of my bank account, such as rent, bills, trips to Vegas, etc. etc.

Let’s be clear about something though: there certainly are physical systems where one variable is likely to be enough to describe them well enough for your purposes. A dropped ball in a vacuum hits the ground with what force? The initial height, one variable, is pretty much all you need. A planet’s orbital period can be gauged from the one variable, its orbital axis (through Kepler’s laws). The conservation of energy says that the initial energy of a system in isolation stays the same. Etc.

The climate properties we are interested in are not like these systems. Unless you show that they are. Which virtually none of the people using this argument have. Maybe this is unfair to expect of them, although I’m not sure why if they’re all going to posture as such Smart People on the side of Science all the time, but in any event they don’t get to just ignore or wish the problem away.

The climate is a humongously-many dimensional system. Yes maybe if CO2 goes up, the temperature goes up, because there’s a greenhouse effect. But maybe other stuff happens. Maybe all the extra energy just stirs up the oceans a barely-perceptible amount, which absorb it all like a flywheel. Maybe there are feedback, self-limiting or cycle effects, like when predators eat all their prey, thriving for a while, but then start starving when they can’t find any more prey, which therefore start increasing, etc. To really get a handle on any of this, you need a model. A real model, not the third-grade version. Well, climate science has its models. And I think they’re a load of crap.

You don’t? Why not? Have you looked at those models? (I have.)

This is the problem I have with the one-dimensional story. The one-dimensional story bypasses all these considerations that are really central to the issue. The one-dimensional story is for simpleminded one-dimensional people who don’t want to bother to dig into the real story but do want the benefits/power/honor they think will accrue to them in the telling of it; for people who don’t want to do the leg-work but do want to skip ahead to the part where they get to tell other people what to do: in other words, it’s tailor-made for Smart People.

“Peer Review”: More Magical Than Jesus

A fascinating symptom of the climate-change religion is the Believer who comes down with a case of something approaching holy worship of the phrase “peer review”. Magic, magic “peer review” – all-powerful and truth-finding. Listen to any Believer, there is nothing “peer review” can’t accomplish. Whatever has been “peer reviewed” is double-plus yestruth. Whatever has not been “peer reviewed” is void and nothingness.

This “peer review” worship is especially intense among Believers who know nothing about science, have never participated in science, have never written a scientific paper, and of course, it goes without saying, have never themselves been one of those vaunted “peer reviewers” they worship so much. Like I have.

There is a paradox, however. If “peer reviewers” are so infallible, and I’ve been a “peer reviewer”, and yet I reject the Global Warming religion, shouldn’t a climate-change Believer’s head explode?

Racist Anti-Racists

This article in Science Daily details a “study” that wrings its hands over what percentage of video game characters (video game characters) are minorities. For example we are told that “fewer than 3 percent of video game characters were recognizably Hispanic”. Science!

The fascinating thing about this sort of “study” is the racist thinking it brings out. No, not the racist thinking in its subject (video game companies), but the racist thinking in the people doing the study. Here’s something Dmitri Williams, the study leader, says:

“Latino children play more video games than white children. And they’re really not able to play themselves,” Williams said.

What Williams means by this is that if you’re a Latino child, and you play a video game, and the character you control is not Latino, you’re “not playing yourself”. Conversely if the character you control is Latino, then you’re “playing yourself”! And similarly for other races – a black kid controlling a black character is “playing himself”, a white kid controlling a white character is “playing himself”, etc. And it would equally follow that if a white kid controls a black or Latino character, he’s “not playing himself”, and we should all be disappointed.

Kids should only control video game characters who are the same race (and sex) as them. See how racist that is?

I mean presumably if Williams walked into a room where a 9-year-old Latino kid was playing, oh I don’t know, Grand Theft Auto, and he looked at the screen, and the character being controlled was this big Latino thug, Williams would say to the kid approvingly: “Hey, you’re playing yourself! That’s you!” and we would all feel emotionally overwhelmed with joy and start singing Kum Bah Yah.

Call me crazy, but I see things differently. For one thing, I have never, ever “played myself” in a video game: I have never played a video game where the character I controlled was “me”. Yes I have played video games where the character I control is the same race as me, but that didn’t make him “me”. Professor Williams thinks it does. Conversely I have played video games where the character I controlled was not the same race and/or gender as me, and it didn’t bother me one bit, I didn’t feel deprived by that fact at all. Professor Williams thinks it should have.

He, and the premise of the study, identifies identity wholly with race. In that sense he, like his study’s premise, is racist.

I Made A Cartoon On The Computer, And It Shows A Catastrophe Happening To The Earth (In The Future). So Gimme.

I made a cartoon on the computer, and it shows a catastrophe happening to the earth (in the future)**. Here, just look at the graphs yourself. (The ones I made.)

Heard enough? Good: give me a cushy lifetime position and autocratic power over how everyone else lives, please. Otherwise you are anti-Science.

No, I’m not going to describe to you how I made this cartoon or what sort of raw data it was based on. That is proprietary! I put a lot of work into it!***

So, again: position, and power, please. (And money, it goes without saying.) Otherwise you’re anti-Science.

That’s the basic scam argument.

**Don’t tell anyone, but the actual model/cartoon in question was a video game, I think maybe it was ‘Civilization III’ or maybe IV…

***37 hours of gameplay so far.

My Accidental Priesthood

One of the odder, random-seeming facts of my biography is that – unlike 99.999% of the internet people who like to spout off about climate change – I have actually performed climate research and worked on climate models. It’s something I often forget, but it does seem relevant and comes in handy to bring up to The Believers. After all, it’s just amazing to me the number of people who have strong, strong, STRONG opinions on ‘climate change’ yet don’t have the first freaking clue what they’re talking about. In fact, by my observation, the less a person actually knows about climate modelling, the more of a Believer they are. This applies to everyone from Judy Collegegirl Blogger on up to Al “Nobel” Gore. (Yes, I do think Al Gore knows some stuff that he has gleaned from reading and from conversations with his advisors/sciency friends and whatnot, but if he actually knows what are the Rossby Number or the Reynolds Number, the Lax-Wendroff Theorem or the Biot-Savart law, etc etc, I’d be shocked.)

So here’s my spiel on ‘climate change’ then (adapted from a private email to a friend). For the record:

I think most variability we observe and are going to observe in the climate is likely to be due to exogenous forcing from the sun’s natural variability, with other stuff (like CO2) as minor/residual effects not worth bothering about.

The basic physical argument is to say “CO2 is a greenhouse gas” and wave your hands a lot. Saying that because CO2 is a greenhouse gas we’re going to have global warming is like saying that because my bank account earns interest I’m going to be a trillionaire. You can’t just focus on one effect, tell a simplistic one-dimensional story, forget about feedback and other effects and time, and think you’re done.

So really AGW is just based on computer models. The computer models don’t impress me and never did. They are the exact same sorts of models that create ocean waves in Pixar cartoons – they look nice and plausible and often very pretty, but I wouldn’t base serious decisions on the result.

These guys are trying to model a giant chaotic system with hopelessly simplified dynamics (e.g. using 2 1/2 dimensions for the ocean and ‘shallow water’ equations..) and hopelessly large grid sizes (think approximating the ocean/air as giant Lego bricks 5km on a side). They all have to therefore include ‘effective’ coefficients (read: fudge factors) to try to take into account things they know they are missing (like turbulence) due to this pixellation. Sometimes they have only very sloppy explanations for this or that factor. I saw one talk where the guy was asked ‘why did you chose that factor = +1 instead of -1′ (or whatever) and he said “Because my choice leads to warming rather than cooling, and we know there’s warming”. In other words the models can be cooked, and are cooked, to produce any desired outcome. (Guess what the desired/’correct’ outcome always seems to be?)

Meanwhile, the physics/chemistry are still incomplete. They don’t know how to model the atmosphere-space interface. They don’t know how to model freaking clouds. Clouds seem pretty important right? Last I tuned in, there wasn’t even a consensus as to whether more clouds meant more heating or less. There was dispute about this. They couldn’t model cloud formation and they didn’t know what the effect would be if they could…

So these models end up being hopelessly complicated, often a Voltron-style splicing together of several different models created by different groups, and no observer (or peer reviewer) really audits or knows what goes on in all of them, probably no single person has the entire model in his head. And finally the models have to be driven by “data” which are sporadic (we just don’t have thermometers covering the globe and going back thousands of years – there’s really FAR LESS temperature data than people realize…in many parts/times of the oceans we only have data from ships going along shipping routes), inaccurate, have to be “corrected” for this or that, and may simply be fudged. All of these things are illustrated by the recent email scandal. Nothing in the emails has surprised me (i.e. the fudge factors) because I already knew stuff like that must be going on.

Also, even if the entire theory turns out to be true in its basics, I think there’s no way in hell trying to ‘stop’ global warming by consciously/forcefully limiting CO2 through top-down regulation would survive a cost-benefit analysis. It would almost certainly be cheaper to just adapt to the effects (if they are bad – and not all effects would be bad!) as/when they appear. A big problem in this debate is that climate scientists are not economists (they think that if they identify a Problem it automatically follows that the Problem should be Fixed, regardless of cost). The other problem is that Economists are not climate scientists (they take whatever the most alarmist climate scientists say at face value, and are attracted to alarmist pronouncements because that makes technocrats more important..)

That’s a larger problem I have with this issue, people speak about ‘the scientific consensus’ and don’t realize that different ‘scientists’ study different things, and they don’t necessarily know jack about other fields. ‘The scientific consensus’ is really a small # of climate scientists and a large # of other guys going ‘ok, sure, sounds good I guess’. As we now know, those other guys don’t and usually can’t actually check the work down to the raw data.

To be impressed by such a ‘consensus’ is to reveal that you don’t actually know very much about how actual science works. Oddly, almost accidentally, I do. I was once in that priesthood, for a brief shining moment. But just so we’re clear, the climatology priesthood does contain numerous actual, genuine, honorable scientists. I worked with them. And they behaved nothing like these CRU creeps, who in my opinion, by their behavior, have demonstrated that whatever they are, they are not scientists.

Misanthrope: Dissing Children And Other People On Thanksgiving

• Here’s a giveaway that someone is about to make a dumb political argument: the invokation of hypothetical ‘children’ and how much they ‘know’ and ‘understand’ to support one’s point. e.g., “We adults forget what it’s like to see the world through the eyes of a child. Children know that nuclear bombs are BAD.” Use of the phrase ‘it’s elementary’ here is a dead giveaway that you’re about to see this particularly lame form of argumentation.
• More climate-data fraud surfacing, and I suspect not the last. This scandal has helped me realize one reason I became disenchanted with large-scale-numerical-model-driven scientific research: you can put all the elbow-grease you want into the fancy math but at the end of the day, any ‘model’ has to be fed with input data. Different input data can and does lead to drastically different results. And so you have to get that data from somewhere. But unless it’s going to be you going out and measuring the data by hand, from scratch, the place you’re going to have to get that data from is: other people. And in a very deep sense, I fundamentally do not trust other people, whether they are “scientists” or not. And you see? I am being proven right not to!

Wow

To my discredit, I had never heard the name Norman Borlaug before.

HT: Mike Beversluis

Linx

• All particles might be mini black holes. Does this mean that all black holes are giant particles?
• Arnold Kling says the only two elements of the political system are Progressive Corporatism and The Resistance.
• Excellent, concise post at Tea with FT about the arbitrariness of capital requirements:
  

  If a bank regulator decided that the minimum capital requirements for the banks depended on how much some few specially designated fashion experts fancied the colour of the tie that the borrower´s chief executive officer wore; and that capital requirements so determined could then vary between a high of 12% of the loan and a low of 0.56% would you call this a free market? Of course not, not even if instead of the colour of ties what was used were the ratings of some vaguely defined credit-default risks.

• Steve Sailer cracks me up: “Here are hardworking scientists carefully digging up stuff, but some Broadway musical expert implies that they are racist for finding it and publicizing it.”
• George Will: “The [Obama] administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.” (HT Cafe Hayek)
• Did you know that if you pay off your credit card bills you’ve been “enjoying the equivalent of a free ride” compared to people who don’t? (HT Dr. Frank)

BONUS ZINGS

• Mencius Moldbug on academics:
  

  Academia is a guild of talented and ambitious professionals who, by demonstrating their large and dextrous brains – not to mention their impeccable networking skills, and their infinite patience with the brown product of the cow – extract money, power, and/or status from USG [the U.S. Government].

• Bryan Caplan on the Human Development Index (HDI):
  

  Scandinavia comes out on top according to the HDI because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is.

Global Warming, Simplified

The global warming issue really boils down to two questions:

1. What sorts of future climates is it within our power to arrange for?

2. What’s the best one, all things considered?

Question 1. has to do with feasibility. Not all conceivable future climates (mild spring days, every day!) are humanly possible to create, even given infinite resources. Of course we know one that is: the ‘status-quo climate’, i.e. the one that will be in our future if we take no conscious actions either way. That is certainly possible to arrange for. There may or may not be other significantly-different possible future climates we could create, or a range of climates (the idea that decreasing/increasing CO2 would act like a thermostat that cools/heats the earth is clearly contemplating one such range). These need to be identified, and the actions needed outlined, by anyone wishing to discuss Things We Should Do To Improve The Climate For Us intelligently.

Question 2. on the other hand is about preferences, effects, and (importantly) costs-benefits. Not all possible climates would be equally ‘good’ for all people. It’s not always obvious how to even define ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’. Or how to weigh alternative forms of goodness (or badness). And ‘all things considered’ is a key phrase here! If Climate X would be idyllic and wonderful, but bringing it about (rather than nearly-as-good Climate X’) would require a massive genocide and enslavement of the survivors, then count me out, and I say let’s just go for X’.

Notice one question that is irrelevant to the issue: whether ‘global warming’ is taking place right now, or has been taking place recently. Who cares? Notice another question that is irrelevant to the issue: whether humans have ’caused’ global warming. Who cares?

Neither of these questions matter! The only questions that matter are 1. and 2.: What futures could we arrange, and which one – out of those – should we arrange?

If questions 1. and 2. could be answered, the path would be clear: do the things (from 1.) needed to create the best climate (from 2.), and we’d be done.

Question #1 is mostly, if not purely, a scientific question. In my opinion, what most people fail to understand is that question #2 isn’t. Although science can inform the answer, at root it’s an inherently political question, and always will be. So people who claim to get their opinion on global warming from ‘science’, or that the entire question should be settled ‘based purely on the science’, are in effect saying that they haven’t thought the issue through, haven’t considered the full scope of the matter, and don’t want others to either. In a way they’re being anti-science.

How we address global warming intrinsically has a political dimension. Science is not about ignoring important dimensions of problems. It can be about ignoring unimportant ones, if necessary. The global-warming enthusiasists who style themselves “pro-science” are actually doing the opposite.

Work-Starred

Slow day at work today (my boss wasn’t there).

1. Alex Tabarrok makes a free-market case for bank nationalization. My views have been largely in line with this (although for an even better refinement, check out this fun-to-read case for doing the normal thing he links to in the update). Tabarrok hits on something that’s been bothering me for a while – lefties (e.g. Matthew Yglesias) who seem to be inexplicably infatuated with the concept of bank nationalization just for the sake of nationalization. Every time I see that sort of thing I figure they all must think it’s the left-wing thing to do. I’ve never understood why though, and Tabarrok helps explain why it’s not:

…it [the term "nationalization"] confuses people on the left who think that nationalization is a way to insure that taxpayers get something on the upside. That idea is a joke – there is no upside.

Indeed.

2. Mark Thoma makes fun of Judd Gregg for thinking tax cuts “pay for themselves”, helpfully citing quotes in which Gregg didn’t actually say that. I have commented there.

3. Ezra Klein explains why he thinks that control of the Census is important: because, according to him, the people who don’t answer when a government bureaucrat “knocks” on their door to count them (a phenomenon which, incidentally, has never actually happened to me – I’ve gotten little pieces of paper in the mail..) are “mainly immigrants and the urban poor”. Therefore they are undercounted and never counted. Poor them, no one knows they exist. But here’s the magical part: Ezra Klein has somehow counted them, regardless! (He must have, because this is the only way he could know that the non-census-responders are “mainly” immigrants and the urban poor.) Isn’t that good for Ezra? Oh yes, I have commented there.

4. Cute point made by Jerry Taylor in The Corner. Apparently, according to scientific research, vitamin supplements basically don’t do diddly squat. Not in and of itself all that surprising. But the point Taylor makes (which is obviously anecdotal but has the ring of truth to it) is that there is a huge overlap between the sort of person who would claim to be pro-science and that the last eight years were a scientific Dark Ages, and the sort of person who is into Whole Foods and vitamin supplements, and basically, well, ignores the actual science on the stuff. Heh.

5. Matt Springer at Built On Facts on the vast difference between how questioning, inquiry and debate works in the political sphere vs. how it works in the scientific sphere. I prefer the scientific sphere myself, which may help explain why political debates so often leave me so cold when they don’t merely irritate me.

6. More science: courtesy Teleologic, another scientist who doesn’t buy into global warming. You know, the thing that is supposedly the ‘consensus’ of all scientists. Having worked on oceano-atmospheric models myself, I can attest that this excerpt rings pretty true:

“My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

What he’s talking about when he refers to “sub-grid scale processes” is that, in climate models, the ocean/atmosphere have to be approximated by pretending that instead of big flowing continuua of fluid, they are, somewhat like Lego blocks, a clunky pixellated set of squares/cubes. Cubes that ‘talk to’/communicate with each other via physical laws. Now, of course, all models do this one way or another, by necessity, but when you do it, you have to get comfort that your grid size is small enough to capture all the important effects. Are you simulating Lara Croft in all her curvy flowing beauty, or are you simulating Mario from Donkey Kong? And does it matter? The problem with climate modeling is that – due to turbulence, cloud formation, and other effects, it really matters.

The grids used in climate models are typically kilometers on a side, at best. Pretty chunky Legos – or should I say Duplos?

And then there’s the part about manipulating observed data. That actually sounds a little strong (and misleading) to me, because the ‘manipulating’ they’re trying to do – if they’re doing it right, that is – is to correct for known biases and gaps in measurements. But let me just say that it was when I started to get into how, say, sea-surface-temperature data was collected and how it was used, as well as how satellite measurements were interpreted, that I decided not to actually go into climate modeling. Everyone is familiar with the rule GIGO (garbage in-garbage out), I hope.

Could The Sun Actually Play A Role In The Climate?

Don’t look now but the Sun has been less active than it has in almost 100 years. And apparently low-sunspot cycles can be correlated with Earth-getting-cooler periods.

Hey, here’s a strange thought: what if the Sun’s lowered activity were to make the earth get a bit colder now? Indeed, what if – a a general rule – the Sun actually has something to do with how hot or cold the Earth gets?

Naw, couldn’t be. That would screw up the perpetual political platform of way too many people. No, clearly what we need is to implement a trillions-of-dollars tax on the carbon-containing molecules we produce as soon as possible. (If the Earth starts to cool before we do so, we might lose our chance forever.)

Comment: I

Fire Megan McArdle continues to simply RIP Megan’s capillary to shreds with another great argument. This time, they deftly rebut Megan’s (semi tongue in cheek) post musing about ways to cool the atmosphere with what is essentially an argument from ignorance: the atmosphere is too COMPLEX to possibly know how doing anything will affect anything! Chaos, you see!

The person who I take it is supposed to be considered FMM’s resident scientist even cited the ridiculous Jeff-Goldblum-in-Jurassic-Park character as if that was supposed to lend credence to what he is saying, but I’m trying – I’m trying real hard – to let that slide. (Will his next post brag about how he can recognize a “UNIX system”?)

Anyway, I detected a slight inconsistency in this ‘we can’t possibly model the atmosphere it’s so COMPLEX’ point of view coming from someone who evidently believes¹ in the predictions made by scientist-crafted computer models of the atmosphere, and said so.

¹CORRECTION: The author of the piece Nutella claims to be a skeptic about claims of model-predicted climate change, so I seem to have misrepresented his views. I got the wrong impression from the fact that (despite the skepticism he claims to have) he writes as if climate-change claims are correct and reducing CO2 output is a worthwhile goal in itself. My mistake.

M. Explains Steam

“If you make waffles, it goes up in the clouds.”

Faith and Symbolism

Let’s say you consider yourself a progressive who’s interested in protecting the environment. What do you think about the Kyoto Protocol?

Chances are: you’re in favor of it. You want us to sign it. You want the politicians who represent you to be in favor of it. You want them to pledge to sign it. If/when they get in office you want them to sign it. Anyone who is against or expresses doubts or negative views about the Kyoto Protocol, and the prospect of the U.S. signing it, you are against. You will criticize them. You may even consider such a person a Neanderthal, anti-science, regressive, against progress. Or worse.

Chances also are: You’ve never read a single word of the ‘Kyoto Protocol’ and have no real idea what’s in it. (Is it a document, or something? Is there some single manuscript called ‘The Kyoto Protocol’ with 173 pages that you could read, or whatever? No, I don’t know either.) This thing, which you consider SO important and SO mandatory for our nation to sign and SO crucial that our politicians pledge support for – when it comes right down to it, you know virtually nothing about it.

Other than the fact, of course, that – you’ve heard, or read in articles – it’s ‘for the environment’ (in some way) and that it would ‘limit CO2′ somehow. You don’t really know how – the mechanisms, the legal strictures, the bureaucratic bodies involved. You don’t know whether its method would be cost-effective or have unintended consequences. If its method costs 173 trillion dollars you wouldn’t know it. If it sets up a world dictator with execution power over every other human, you wouldn’t know it. If it had a secret tiny clause that mandated gassing everyone whose last name begins with the letter ‘K’ you wouldn’t know it. These are all mere details and you (chances are) consider them unimportant; after all, you haven’t taken the trouble to investigate them, have you? Be honest.

Neverthless, supporting Kyoto is NECESSARY and not supporting it is EVIL.

Again: this all (chances are) applies to you if you consider yourself ‘progressive’ and ‘pro-science’. You have faith that the ‘Kyoto Protocol’, whatever is actually in it, is a-ok. Perhaps this is because (you assume) the document was written by Scientists, or whatever. And your insistence that politicians be in favor of it despite the fact that you don’t know anything about it? This is explainable by the following: the actual outcome of the ‘Kyoto Protocol’ is less important than the fact that your politician, your guy, express support for it. It’s a symbolic thing, you see: at least he is on the correct side of the issue.

It is just interesting, the irrational, faith-based and symbolic stances people can take in the name of rationality and reason.