May 27, 2018

"Most scientists today live in cities and have little direct experience with wild plants and animals, and most biology textbooks now focus more on molecules, cells and internal anatomy..."

"... than on the diversity and habits of species. It has even become fashionable among some educators to belittle the teaching of natural history and scientific facts that can be 'regurgitated' on tests in favor of theoretical concepts. That attitude may work for armchair physics or mathematics, but it isn’t enough for understanding complex organisms and ecosystems in the real world. Computer models and equations are of little use without details from the field to test them against."

That's from a NYT piece by a professor of natural sciences (Curt Stager) who notes a study that "documented a 76 percent decline in the total seasonal biomass of flying insects netted at 63 locations in Germany over the last three decades, asks "Are we in the midst of a global insect Armageddon that most of us have failed to notice?," and warns — quoting Edmund O. Wilson, "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."

I'm worried about the insects, but I'm also worried about the city-living scientists and their tendency toward "armchair physics," "mathematics," and "[c]omputer models and equations" that fall short in understanding the complexities of the real world. I couldn't help thinking about the climate change computer modeling and the consensus of (city-dwelling?) scientists.

The insects are an ecosystem to be understood and — in a way — the scientists are also an ecosystem to be understood. They thrive in the city, doing math with computers.

293 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 293 of 293
Howard said...

Blogger President Pee-Pee Tape said...

Stay poorly informed and ask for more power over my life?

You don't have a life. No one wants "more power" over it.


This made me pee pee in my pants.

Inga...Allie Oop said...

“Have you sent in any pics, Inga? Done any surveys of insects? Bird censuses? Fish-tag programs? Tending petunias is nice, but it ain't science.”

No, I haven’t. But now that we’ve been discussing it, it’s going to be a project for me and my grandkids this summer. I grow far more than petunias, btw. I still think you’re way too confident that you’ve seen “fields” of these rare ladybugs. I trust the researchers and ladybug experts more than your observations. Sorry.

tim in vermont said...

but conservative Dunning_Krueger is satisfied by these modeled temperature cartoons published by christian right-wing scientists from Dixie.

This is the kind of logic that comes from south of the D/K line. Ad hominem. The data is inconvenient, we don't need to prove it wrong! We only need to personally attack the scientist!

Are you sure you want to keep bringing up D/K? Of course you are, being from the "south."

LincolnTf said...

Do it, you will learn a lot.

Birkel said...

Oh, Ritmo. Where would you be without your lies? The 'science' is untreatable theories done by people who adjust data and won't let people have access to the raw data while politicians scream for more power.

The models don't fit reality.
The data are not reproduceable.
It is not science.
The giveaway to be sceptical is that Leftist Collectivists demand more power at every turn.

When the questions change, the concerns change, and the answer is always the same it is important to be a skeptic.

tim in vermont said...

If you tried to make the same kinds of arguments against socialism, citing Stalin and Mao, lefties would be able to make all kinds of fine distinctions! But tobacco and climate? 100% the same. More south of the D/K line logic.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

tim in vermont said...
I just don't think that you know which side you are on.


This is the problem in a nutshell. There is no 'side' for most people. We are trying to assess probabilities. How close are the models? How big is the effect going to be? What are possible mitigators?

We also have to deal with political strategies used by both parties, both pro and con. The con has an easy task, much like the tobacco growers. The pro less so because of all the uncertainty, but even so they have completely fucked it up. Relying on Hollywood to galvanize the troops was a terrible mistake.

Birkel said...

1970s problems - global cooling, silent spring
Answer: more Leftist Collectivist power

1990s problems: ozone, glowball warmening
Answer: more Leftist Collectivist power

2010s problems: climate change, Chinese pollution
Answer: more Leftist Collectivist power

At some point one notices a pattern.

Birkel said...

Leftist Science: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

BAMN toward power.

tim in vermont said...

ARM, except for the fact that I was talking about the D/K line, I agree with your comment.

I think that defending the hockey stick was a huge mistake, because anybody who uses the techniques Mann used, engineers especially, could see he was doing it wrong. Even the climategate emails had fellow scientist mocking the hockey stick, but it was felt that it was an iconic thing and the cost of surrender on that one tactical battle was deemed to be too great. As if time wouldn't pass and the truth wouldn't spread outside the community of people who understood the math involved. As if nobody would ever go out and collect new tree-ring data and compare it to Michael Mann's model.

This is where they lost me, and I am sympathetic.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Oh, Ritmo. Where would you be without your lies? The 'science' is untreatable theories...

LOL!

WTF is an "untreatable theory?"

Everything you say is just political bullshit, and you admitted it on the last page. Quote: "We decidedly DO disagree with 'science' that consistently produces the answer "give Leftist Collectivists power"."

Anywho, as fun as it is to watch you twist like a bobby pin to expose the story of how Joe Stalin and Vladimir Lenin and Mao developed the greenhouse effect theory to keep humans from removing this pesky atmosphere from their planet so we could have the capitalist utopia of airtight enclosed dwellings on a moonlike planet, I do believe I'm going to have to wait for someone less stupid and full of shit to chime in before responding. Your comments have reached joke-like status even from your benchmark, which is saying a lot.

Keep drinking corporatist Kool-Aid, Clavin Birkel.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

1970s problems - global cooling, silent spring
Answer: more Leftist Collectivist power

1990s problems: ozone, glowball warmening
Answer: more Leftist Collectivist power

2010s problems: climate change, Chinese pollution
Answer: more Leftist Collectivist power

At some point one notices a pattern.


Such as, right-wingers can't solve a problem for shit?

tim in vermont said...

My favorite part was where they tried to insist that they weren't masking inconvenient data by graphing it in such a way as to obscure the damning lines (Hide the decline!) It's almost like arguing that planting an informant is not spying. Planting an informant is the definition of spying.

LincolnTf said...

tim in vermont, thanks for reminding me to watch the YouTube "Moving the Line" video. I still remember the day it came out. An absolute masterpiece of crappy graphics and incisive lyrics. YouTube now opening in another tab.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Lewis Wetzel said...
The link between smoking and lung cancer was proven by empirical data.


It was epidemiology not animal experiments that was decisive. The first studies came out in the late 1920's. It wasn't until the 1960's that the government acknowledged the problem and I was still arguing about this in the early 1980's. I smoked and distrusted epidemiology as unscientific.

Lewis Wetzel said...

New social science student: Gosh, prof! I am so excited to be a social science student. It's amazing how you guys use science to study human nature! Propose a hypothesis about a cause and effect relationship, experiment, see where your data takes you, revise the hypothesis, experiment again, until you've reduced your equation to a single dependent variable! I love science!

Social science prof: Err . . . we don't actually do that in social science. The data sets are too large & the points we want to measure usually aren't available, and you can't replicate anything. So instead we hypothesize, and then find a data set that matches our hypothethis. Let me tell you about metastudies! Lot's of good work to be done there . . .

New social science student: Why, that doesn't sound like science at all, prof. Screw it, I'm going into climate science instead.

LincolnTf said...

I guess it's called Hide the Decline, not Moving the Line, but that's the way I always think of it.

Birkel said...

That is two autocorrects you have mocked.
Just below puns, is that humor.

Come on. Be best.

Fabi said...

"Every stinking facet of science and engineering is a model. All data collected are based on models."

Is there something wrong with the Internet or did someone actually type that into a comment?

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Sloppy Birkel. Sloppy data evaluator.

Like he said, first he figures out whose politics the science benefits, then he decides whether he agrees with it.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I think we have our answer for why conservatives don't have very many academic research jobs.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

We also have our answer for why right-wingers have no solutions to anything.

LincolnTf said...

Name a single "Climate Change" policy that doesn't serve the social and economic goals of the Left. Then work backward. You'll figure it out eventually.

tim in vermont said...

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/2013-state-climate-stratospheric-temperature

What a surprise, there doesn't seem to be any stratospheric cooling in the satellite record since the satellites were launched, just after Mt Pinatubo, which caused a temporary warming, as large eruptions do, also Mt St Helens was around then. Of course temporary warmings are followed by steep cooling trends. Once the vulcanos settled down, the trend is flat.

Admittedly, this is only satellite data subject to attack because of the purported religious beliefs of one prominent scientist, but they have been pored over by many many other scientists before being accepted.

Birkel said...

Politician: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

Scientists: If government gives me money, I can find problems for you not to waste.

Conservative: I do not trust the nature of this research because those who funded it want power BAMN.

Leftist Collectivist online: The Right has politicized science.

tim in vermont said...

Like he said, first he figures out whose politics the science benefits, then he decides whether he agrees with it.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I think we have our answer for why conservatives don't have very many academic research jobs.
- Mr PeePeeTapes

but conservative Dunning_Krueger is satisfied by these modeled temperature cartoons published by christian right-wing scientists from Dixie. - Howard, who apparently doesn't believe the satellite data because of the politics of one prominent scientist.

Sebastian said...

"the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago"

No robust enough to deal with the actions of a few hundred thousand humans, and not rich enough to sustain a couple of billion humans.

But then, Wilson always preferred ants.

Michael K said...

The first studies came out in the late 1920's.

Actually the first well done study came out in 1954 by Doll and Bradford Hill.

BMJ. 2004 Jun 26;328(7455):1529-33; discussion 1533.
The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits: a preliminary report. 1954.
Doll R, Hill AB.
Comment in
New insights from the British doctors study. [BMJ. 2004]


The increase in lung cancer had been observed at least since 1939 but the BMJ had other worries for a time.

Birkel said...

The good news when Ritmo lies about what one actually typed is that nobody trusts Ritmo except Inga.

So there's that.

Unknown said...

I'm a physicist and I'm worried about scientists and their preoccupation with computer models and equations that fall short in understanding the the real world.

Lewis Wetzel said...


Blogger Sebastian said...

"the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago"

No robust enough to deal with the actions of a few hundred thousand humans, and not rich enough to sustain a couple of billion humans.

By "rich" he probably meant to indicate "chaotic." So it's chaotic equilibrium -- except it wasn't. The moon has a lot of equilibrium with a biomass of zero.
But it is odd how environmentalists place man outside of nature, as in "look at what man is doing to the natural world." Nature is object, man is subject. The Abrahamic religions teach that man is not nature, he is a separate creation. Why do atheists seem to believe this by default? Nothing could be more natural than man destroying other species, if man is just another species. There is nothing to feel any guilt about. No other animal is concerned about future generations of itself (or past generations, either).

tim in vermont said...

I'm a physicist and I'm worried about scientists and their preoccupation with computer models and equations that fall short in understanding the the real world.

Well there's your problem! You think there is a difference! It puts to mind the story about "In a world of the blind, a one eyed man would be king." In the story the blind men examined the one sighted man, determined that the overactive organs in his face were the problem, and they promptly did him the favor of removing them! The story was called "In the Country of the Blind" by H.G. Wells.

Howard said...

tim: Pinitubo caused cooling as explosive water-rich silicic volcanos do ses Krack a toea east of Java

tim in vermont said...

I was talking about the stratosphere Howard. As I made clear. You can't even understand the arguments that you are dismissing with your D/K comments.

tim in vermont said...

But it does bring up that events that warm the stratosphere cool the troposphere. It's almost like there is a fixed amount of energy coming from the sun? Though I am sure albedo comes into play, but maybe I will go to the IPCC and see where our understanding of albedo is at the moment...

mandrewa said...

Well as it happens, I have worried about this. Not that part about scientists living in cities but the part about what is happening to the insects.

And I have felt silly doing so because it isn't based on any real data. No, it's just based on my personal subjective experience. So even as I have rejected this fear with one part of my mind because of my lack of good evidence for it, still I have had this reoccurring worry, this intrusive thought, that something is happening to the insects.

And what this is based on is that I do spend a lot of time outdoors and I do own a piece of land, and my memory is that in the summertime the air was often filled with insects, sometimes so full, that you would wonder how you could breathe without breathing them in.

And that just doesn't seem to be happening any more.

tim in vermont said...

Despite some advances in the understanding of the physical processes that control the cloud response to climate change and in the evaluation of some components of cloud feedbacks in current models, it is not yet possible to assess which of the model estimates of cloud feedback is the most reliable. However, progress has been made in the identification of the cloud types, the dynamical regimes and the regions of the globe responsible for the large spread of cloud feedback estimates among current models. This is likely to foster more specific observational analyses and model evaluations that will improve future assessments of climate change cloud feedbacks.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-3-2.html

Yeesh! So they are making improvements in understanding their own assumption laden models! Not so much actual clouds, although they do offer the encouraging news that they have identified many types of clouds. I don't mean to bash the IPCC. They are doing the best they can on a very hard problem. It's the strutting morons who claim that the "science is settled" that I mean to bash.

tim in vermont said...

Incidentally, according to estimates using what is actually known, a 1% error in cloud cover calculations would introduce an error equal to doubling of CO2.

Fabi said...

There's a headline on my newsfeed about lava encroaching on a geothermal plant. Is this what the hipsters mean when they say "meta"?

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Ritmo lies about what one actually typed...

That is two autocorrects you have mocked.


Typical right-winger. Can't even take responsibility for what he wrote.

There really is no end to what right-wingers demand others take responsibility for. Now it's "atmospheric science not being right-wing enough." As if science has some obligation to the right-wing and their go-nowhere politics.

Just out-and-out liars through and through. From the top of the Twitter feed all the way down to the lowliest toady.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Incidentally, according to estimates using what is actually known, a 1% error in cloud cover calculations would introduce an error equal to doubling of CO2.

Yeah, and an error in body surface area would double arsenic concentrations. So fucking what? Doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't be poisoning people, asshole.

LincolnTf said...

PPPT, if you really believe what you say you believe, then why are you burning fossil fuels and consuming exotic metals just to cure your boredom? Every keystroke you make is a head-blow to Gaia, don't you know that?

HT said...

Personally, I'm worried about weathermen and women (meteorologists) who have no feel for the weather experienced from work outside.

And since you are so concerned that scientists spend time in nature, you should be heartened to know that Wilson grew up in Alabama studying ants. Like most people in Alabama, he spent a great deal of time outdoors.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Oh yes. Every keystroke.

You must come from one of those states where the local utility has a stranglehold over the legislature and governor's office and doesn't allow you to choose the source of your energy.

You're very transparent. Just admit that you don't believe what you say and find the science too troubling and politically inconvenient to accept.

LincolnTf said...

And now another honeybee is dead because PPPT can't shake his Internet addiction.

Michael K said...

Ritmo has no friends so he hassles people here who are just trying to have a nice conversation.

He hasn't figured out why he has no friends and people shun him, even on the internet.

Birkel said...

Politician: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

Scientists: If government gives me money, I can find problems for you not to waste.

Conservative: I do not trust the nature of this research because those who funded it want power BAMN.

Leftist Collectivist online: The Right has politicized science.

Also: the politics that has given Republicans the presidency, the Senate (nominally and expanding on Jan 1), the House, a majority of governorships, and a majority of state legislatures is now...

"go nowhere politics"

Because reasons.

Stephen A. Meigs said...

New social science student: Why, that doesn't sound like science at all, prof. Screw it, I'm going into climate science instead.

I think that's a reason why many people are (in my opinion) too skeptical of universities when it comes to climate science. The "science" of queer theory taught at most universities, for instance, is so evil, obviously wrong, screwed-up, and against common sense that genuinely conservative skeptics tend to think it likely that almost everything done at universities is the same. Just as black people may suffer one day in the appropriate backlash against sodomy from civil rights for blacks having been lumped together with "civil rights" to sodomy, scientific understanding of climate change has suffered from people equating research about it at universities with all the nonsense that takes place at universities nowadays.

Universities are so full of young people susceptible to seductions like sodomy, sodomy just tends to be more popular there, both among students and professors, etc., wanting to seduce youth or pander to them. And then you've got the professors acting like what is shameful is not studying for class enough or getting bad grades (as opposed to pursuing vile addictions like sodomy)--professors tend to be judged by how their students perform on their examinations, and so by way of encouraging attention to their class they may tend to act like if you don't study hard, uh-oh, that's what makes your butt fall off.

And universities tend to undervalue reflection, i.e., observing one's own tendencies and thought processes, so important to common sense. What goes on inside my head I can observe just as well when staring into space as when listening to a lecture--no professors or tuition payments required, an inconvenient truth for them to emphasize.

A more democratically accountable university system would help. And there needs to be greater variety in research and beliefs. For instance, if 99% of recent research in philosophy and evolutionary psychology is ridiculous or boring at universities, this would not be so bad if there were significant excellent research occurring at universities in the other 1%, but I doubt there is that much. I haven't found any of it, anyway, though I suppose it may well exist some obscure place somewhere.

Identification of plants (and insects, too, I suppose) is one of those things where a teacher walking along with you in the forest could be an enormous help (over referring to keys in books). Most hard science, on the other hand, can be learned by me as well if not better from a book than from a lecture, at least once I get the attitude that is useful when thinking about it. And so it does seem strange and unfortunate that the former sort of hands-on teaching isn't more common.

tim in vermont said...

Geez Ritmo, at least try. Even you don't believe that CO2 is a poison do you?

But here is more from actual scientist, not the media. As ARM likes to say: "R'oh oh!"

By examining a suite of 24 simulations with deep convection, shallow convection, macrophysics/microphysics, and radiation parameterizations reordered, process order is shown to have a big impact on predicted climate. In particular, reordering of processes induces differences in net climate feedback that are as big as the intermodel spread in phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2017MS001067

mandrewa said...

Michael K said: I had not known that the windmills were chewing up bats in such numbers. It sounds horrific. Where can I learn more?

About 25 miles from where I own some land, a large number of windmills have been erected. The visible change that I have noticed is that the vultures have disappeared.

It used to be that every day of the year, I'd see at least one or two vultures patrolling overhead. Sometimes there would be many dozens of vultures, but that usually meant that something had died.

The vultures, I'm pretty sure, watch each other and if one acts like it's found something, then that will pull in vultures from miles around. The windmills are close enough that I believe vultures in my area can see a vulture over there acting like it's found something. Then they fly over and get killed by the windmills because the vultures have no sense of just how fast those windmill tips are moving.

The bats in my area are also almost totally gone. The air used to be full of them. But I don't blame the windmills. They disappeared before the windmills could possibly have played a role and I know what the culprit is. It's a disease called white nose syndrome which is caused by a fungus that is endemic in Eurasia. The bats in Eurasia are adapted to it so it doesn't threaten them, but the bats native to the United States just get wiped out by it.

Somehow that fungus reached American caves, which are where most of the bats in my area overwinter. And it seems subjectively that something like 99+% of the bats have disappeared.

This is the reason by the way that most of the American species that are dying, are dying: Eurasian diseases.

The second biggest reason would be Eurasian species replacing very similar American species because the invasive species is freed from whatever is normally keeping it in check in Eurasia.

tim in vermont said...

I think that's a reason why many people are (in my opinion) too skeptical of universities when it comes to climate science.

Did you read the paper by Oreskes? Or do you just block out everything that threatens your preconceptions and hope that by ignoring such evidence, you become more convincing? Why isn't anybody coming here and knocking down my arguments? Explaining to me how I am misinterpreting these scientific papers? Lots of university types read here, surely one could take a couple of minutes to set me right! I am always listening to arguments made by warmies, waiting for that one fresh bit of evidence that says that the science has made some breakthrough and improved our understanding and it really is as bad as we think.

Mostly (exclusively) what I get are people like you who were convinced by the authority of the people who told you this stuff, and apparently feel inadequate to examine the arguments yourself.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Ritmo has no friends so he hassles people here who are just trying to have a nice conversation.

He hasn't figured out why he has no friends and people shun him, even on the internet.


Awwwww.... LOL! Michael the Monkey Special K. actually relies on the internet for making friends. That's hilarious and explains a lot.

It also explains a lot that he prioritizes arbitrary agreement with ill-informed ideologues over truth. That sort of explains his politics, in a nutshell. Genuflection to power over reason and truth. Most right-wingers think this way.

Michael said...

Windmills knock the shit out of raptors as well. But "free" energy. And ever so lovely to see and hear.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Geez Ritmo, at least try. Even you don't believe that CO2 is a poison do you?

Well, not until you get it up to concentrations that make you unconscious and ill. But your republicanism kept you from learning that bit, too, I see. Did you believe we inhale it and exhale oxygen?

Listen, Slow Lane. The point is that it's irresponsible to do something that you know is damaging and destructive regardless of the necessary uncertainties in its chemical calculations. Can you distinguish between the dose of arsenic that will someone and one that, if you get lucky enough, might not? Nothing's for certain. The point is you'll still go to jail either way - either for attempted murder or actual murder. What you advocate with industrial policy is an attempted destruction of planetary geochemical cycles, regardless of how lucky for how long you get until it's irreversible.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Windmills knock the shit out of raptors as well.

Sticking up for one's fellow vultures and turkey buzzards is apparently a form of solidarity that transcends the species barrier for Michael the Globalist.

Michael said...

Piss Ant

Fuck off cocksucker.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

u mad bro?

Bruce Hayden said...

“The monstrous windmills, built by idiots relying on federal grants and the delusion of global warming due to fossil fuels, are killing hundreds of thousands of bats each year along with a few hundred eagles.”

I am thinking how humorous it would be if the Trump Administration were to rescind the waiver that the Obama Administration granted to windmills for their killing of bald eagles (otherwise a federal crime). Currently, neither you or I can legally kill an eagle - unless we do it via power generating windmill. Rescind the waiver, and watch the global warming cultists go berzerk.

Michael K said...

I guess that was a "NO" from Ritmo.

Michael K said...

"Rescind the waiver, and watch the global warming cultists go berzerk."

Yes. People tend not to like bats so that is less sexy but the eagles are a way to stop it.

The bats are far more important, like sparrows in China.

Paco Wové said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Paco Wové said...

"...the air was often filled with insects, sometimes so full, that you would wonder how you could breathe without breathing them in.

And that just doesn't seem to be happening any more."


Not seeing the downside here.

Birkel said...

Ritmo/TTR/PPPT

Can you please define "go somewhere" politics.

"Go nowhere" involves winning a lot of elections. I get that.

What would going somewhere be?

Bruce Hayden said...

“My personal marker, I set a couple decades ago, as to whether the enhanced greenhouse effect was as bad as claimed was stratospheric cooling. The claim is, and it makes perfect sense, that the amount of heat coming from the sun is stable, so if the troposphere (where we live) is trapping heat, the stratosphere must cool. Because if the whole atmosphere is becoming warmer, then there is something else at play aside from the greenhouse effect, which only redistributes heat downward towards us, it can't create it. The stratosphere is so sparse that once an IR photon reaches it, it is as good as in space.”

Except that the amount of energy (Energy, not heat, per se, is the critical element here) from the sun, is far from constant, and that is one of the biggest problems with many of the AGW models - they ignore the effects of varying solar radiation on the global climate. Which is part of why the 97% of climate scientists believing in global warming - because while they counted tree ring counters, like much of the original ClimateGate cabal, the excluded physicists, and esp astrophysicists, who would have, naturally, questioned this assumption, knowing it to be false.

A year or two ago, some researchers did what should have been done up front, and used the sorts of statistical techniques taught in business school, that look for correlation when none is known to occur. They tried to statistically determine which of 4-5 factors that included solar radiation, El Niño/La Niña, ocean temperature, and included CO2 concentration were statistically significant, when taken together, determined global temperatures. And, to surprise of some, the one factor that appeared not to be a statistical factor in determining global temperatures was CO2. Would have probably saved the world economies trillions of dollars. Statistical analysis techniques that MBAs, but apparently not PhD “climate scientists”, are routinely taught. Of course, much of the problems with the earlier work pointing towards AGW is probably a result of bad statistical methodology, and not any real dishonest intent. Indeed - the concept of trying to generate a single yearly global temperature from daily surface readings alone is statistically preposterous.

wildswan said...

Lewis Wetzel said...
"Social science prof: Err . . . we don't actually do that in social science. The data sets are too large & the points we want to measure usually aren't available, and you can't replicate anything. So instead we hypothesize, and then find a data set that matches our hypothethis. Let me tell you about metastudies! Lot's of good work to be done there . . ."

Actually social scientists now have all the data from Facebook, Twitter, Google searches, the Census and the IRS for the social side and genome wide searches for the scientific side and computers to crunch the data and NIH funding. So behavioral genetics is in a golden era - the era before most people realize that pixels say what words tell them to say.

Bruce Hayden said...

“The bats are far more important, like sparrows in China.”

Yeh, but we don’t have bats on our currency.

Of course, we wouldn’t have this opportunity, if our founders had picked Ben Franklin’s choice for our national bird (turkeys).

tim in vermont said...

Listen, Slow Lane.

It's exquisite pleasure to be called stupid by an imbecile. I think that's a French saying. But I will give you the benefit of the doubt here.

You brought up Trump? OK, I don't think that we should remove a sitting president lightly, even if it is Donald Trump. Not without strong evidence, because I think that would be bad for the country, irrespective. Just like removing Clinton would have been.

In the same vein, I don't think that we should radically re-structure our economy, which despite your protestations, actually works very well, much better than the experiments in socialism, without, you know, actual evidence that drastic measures like that, the economic dislocation, family disruption, etc, etc, etc, that that would entail are not worse that the problem you are trying to solve.

We are on a planet that has never been overly stable, and if we have managed to warm bias it a little bit, and put an end to the pernicious ice ages that have been dogging the planet for four million years, well, sorry, that's to the good. There have been at least two episodes within written history when it was as warm or warmer than today, Roman times, and around 1,000 AD. Mankind has survived the Eemian interglacial when it was much warmer than today for thousands of years.

Sea levels were 20 to 30 feet higher then than today. Please note that the following graph is logarithmic, making it look as the the temperature spike in the Eemian was brief compared to today, which it was not, and note that the temperature spike on the end is projected based on unproven models. Somehow, BTW, polar bears survived this world that was much warmer than today for thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg

A return of the ice age would be far worse for mankind than the modest warming that looks more and more like is in the cards.

So please spare me your solutions until we understand the problem.

tim in vermont said...

Except that the amount of energy (Energy, not heat, per se, is the critical element here) from the sun, is far from constant, and that is one of the biggest problems with many of the AGW models

Yeah, but I try to argue with them from their premises. Assuming what they believe to be true is true.


OK. Now I am going to go out for a drink with a couple of friends, so I am going to leave this as my last word. My house in South Florida abuts a wildlife preserve of thousands of acres, connected to a system of swampy preserves that continue from maybe Orlando to the Everglades. You would think that bugs would be a problem, but nobody even bothers anymore to screen in their swimming pools. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, it seems to me, everybody screened in their swimming pools. I never swat a bug. The only real insect pest is the fire ants.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

I guess that was a "NO" from Ritmo.

I guess this is an indication from Special K, graduate of the Michael the Monkey Medical School for Kids Who Can't Read Good (and Who Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too) that he advocates breathing CO2 in concentrations of 7% or more.

Michael K said...

The bats in my area are also almost totally gone. The air used to be full of them. But I don't blame the windmills. They disappeared before the windmills could possibly have played a role

You could be describing a factor but one of the articles I linked to describes thousands of bat carcasses beneath the wind mills.

Michael K said...

More poo throwing. Has Ritmo been to the zoo ? The monkey cage ?

Bruce Hayden said...

Blogger Stephen A. Meigs said...
“I don't know why anyone would think that computer models shouldn't be used when trying to determine how much climate change is likely to happen. Just look at how useful computers have been in helping to predict the weather. True, more emphasis should be placed on figuring out how to program the computer model (mainly involving figuring out what formulas should be used in the model) than how to increase computing speed, etc., or than running the program a zillion times under varying conditions, but So what? Sure, climate scientists might for selfish reasons be tempted to justify their importance by overstating the risks of climate change, but my impression is it's more likely that they and others will be selfishly tempted to selfishly justify selfish depredations of the environment by understating the dangers of climate change. People can make more money by encouraging others to not care about the consequences of their pollution. I think that on balance that atmospheric scientists using computer models are more likely to be right in predicting climate change than anyone else.”

Weather prediction is, to some extent, computing limited, because the more computational resources you have available, the smaller the cells you can work with. That was much more a problem though when I was working as a NOAA IT contractor 35 years ago. One of the guys we worked with had come over from the Weather Bureau (in Suitland FOB 2) to run the administrative systems (FOB 3). He gave us a tour - they had, at the time, the fastest IBM systems build (they moved to Crays a year or two later). Now, it appears more a resolution problem.

I will suggest though that talking about programming the equations misses the complexity. Programming equations is relatively easy, in the scope of things. Of course, ClimateGate showed that even that was too complicated for the cabal initially behind AGW to do correctly (East Angelia hired a programmer to clean up the code that generated their benchmark HADCRUT global temperature database. He quit a year or two later in frustration - they seem to have been even worse programmers than statisticians). The issue then is not really programming equations, but rather the assumptions about the real world that they program into their models (assuming that they are doing it competently and accurately, which the East Anglia climate scientists clearly weren’t capable of doing). The models have gotten progressively more sophisticated, over time, as the simpler models have consistently failed to agree with reality. These models now try to take into account the cycles of cloud formation, ocean heat transfer, etc. the biggest problem though is that we really don’t understand exactly how the climate works, and so a lot of simplifications are introduced, that maybe get their models closer to reflecting reality, but clearly, they are far from it yet.


chickelit said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
chickelit said...

I thought the albedo was what made Gore so damn rornry all the time.

Michael K said...

but my impression is it's more likely that they and others will be selfishly tempted to selfishly justify selfish depredations of the environment by understating the dangers of climate change.

Now we understand where you are coming from. I would suggest that weather satellites have been far more useful in climate prediction.

I've navigated across the Pacific using weather maps. No computer that I am aware of is of much use in this.

Birkel said...

Bruce Hayden,

Now get those scientists to tell us about the output of the sun. That giant thermonuclear reactor in the middle of the solar system is an uncooperative ball of plasma.

The Known Unknowns are incredibly complex and are difficult to observe directly (even if we know what we are trying to observe).

What ever happened to that lawsuit filed by Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann? Off to find out...

FullMoon said...

REMINDER: Obama was caught spying on the French President, German Media & G.President, FOX News, Associated Press, CBS Sharyl Attkisson & the ENTIRE U.S via NSA & Snowden. Yet Trump is a "conspiracy theorist, liar" for his documented claims he too was spied upon??? #SpyGate

Birkel said...

As John Nolte of the Daily Wire has noted, "In order to spy on James Rosen of Fox News, Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder named him as a criminal co-conspirator and, quite incredibly, a flight risk. This gave the Obama administration 'legal' access not only to Rosen's emails but Rosen's parents' phone records."

LINK

Lewis Wetzel said...

Blogger tim in vermont said...
. . . I never swat a bug. The only real insect pest is the fire ants.

That's because the fire ants ate the other insects!!!
I am not a scientist, but I do have a lab coat, and my sister is a high school science teacher.

Bruce Hayden said...

I should add that models are helpful to science. They aren’t the science, per se, but can, if accurate, be helpful, in understanding how things work. Famously, there was a model of an earth centric universe (or solar system), which got progressively more complex, as more evidence was discovered. The orbits of the planets had retrograde portions, etc. And then it was suggested that most of the complexity the retrograde orbits, disappeared, if they switched to a sun based model of the solar system. The orbits were all of a sudden simple ellipses. Somewhat similarly, Newton did an excellent job at predicting how physics worked - until Einstein had to show that Newton’s Laws were special cases of low relative V, and progressively differed from reality as V approached C (the speed of light).

My kid a couple weeks ago successfully defended their dissertation (and was “hooded” as a PhD) (but still needs to finish writing it). Their work uses a combination of fluid dynamics and quantum physics to use adjustable lasers to determine either temperature or pressure of some simple gasses. The point here is that they created a model of what they thought was going on, then tested it, modified their assumptions, and thus, the model, until they got close enough that their system was useful in the world. They are dealing with distances of inches and feet, and the vibrational characteristics of very simple molecules, and, yet, it took several years to build a useful model. And notably vibrational characteristics, along with the fluid dynamics are well established and have been taught to undergrads for decades. The climate model assumptions are far more complex, by many orders of magnitude. We just don’t know that well how heat moves through the atmosphere interacts with Water, and then moves through the oceans, then back into the atmosphere. Etc. It would be great if climate scientists could guess at simplifications of physical reality, program them into a model, and that model does a good job at forecasting, and hindcasting. But they don’t, which leaves us with the question of whether it is luck, or skill, that makes them as close to reality as they are. Are the simplifying assumptions that the use viable simplifications? We just don’t know.

More later on statistically overdetermined models (called to dinner).

Lewis Wetzel said...

Blogger tim in vermont said...
I am always listening to arguments made by warmies, waiting for that one fresh bit of evidence that says that the science has made some breakthrough and improved our understanding and it really is as bad as we think.


When you point out problems with the science and the models, they point to empirical data ("But teh glaciers are melting and polar bears are dying!"), when you point out problems with the empirical data, they point to the brilliant climate scientists and their mathematical models.
The antiwarmistas do this too, but the anti-warmistas who do aren't climate scientists or school teachers.

Howard said...

Blogger tim in vermont said...

I was talking about the stratosphere Howard. As I made clear. You can't even understand the arguments that you are dismissing with your D/K comments.


OK Tim, my bad. The stratospheric warming from volcano's is predicted by climate modelz. So you agree that GCMs are useful

gadfly said...

The insects started this war. Mosquito-spread Malaria resulted in 212 million cases of malaria and 429,000 deaths from the disease in 2015 alone - 90% of the horror occurred in sub-Sahara Africa. All this dying courtesy of The environmental movement's equivalent to Benedict Arnold, Rachael Carson, who succeeded in getting DDT banned.

Asian fleas on black rats spread the Bubonic Plague which killed as many as 200 million people on the silk route between China and Europe in the first half of the 14th century.

So now the battles are being won by the good guys - the loveliest of all, of course, is the Unicorn.

Gahrie said...

What ever happened to that lawsuit filed by Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann? Off to find out...

Still grinding its way on...which was the whole point of course.

Gahrie said...

Civilization did not cause global warming...global warming caused civilization.

Fact: The Earth is currently in an ice age called the Quaternary that began about 2.5 million years ago.

Fact: Modern man first appeared around 300,000 years ago by the current best estimate. For the vast majority of that time, about 290,000 years, man wandered around in small packs of hunter-gatherers.

Fact: The Earth entered an interglacial called the Holocene, and the Earth began to warm, around 12,000 years ago. The Holocene is still active today.

Fact: Around 10,000 years ago, as the Earth warmed, man developed agriculture. Agriculture led to surplus. Surplus allowed specialization. Specialization eventually led to cities. Finally, around 5,000 years ago, history began.

All of human history, all of human civilization has occurred during global warming.

CJ said...

Not a fan of NYT science, but at least they don’t get Edward Wilson the biologist confused with Edmund Wilson the writer-editor-critic who has been dead for 46 years.

chickelit said...

Gahrie wrote: Fact: The Earth is currently in an ice age called the Quaternary that began about 2.5 million years ago.

And:
All of human history, all of human civilization has occurred during global warming.

So the 2.5 M-year-old ice age seems to be waning. Trend: warming. Quick question: What range of temperatures has earth experienced since man emerged 300k yr ago? (or best estimated). I have another thought...

Owen said...

Bruce Hayden: great comments about the limitations of climate models. Tim in Vermont, ditto.

Gahrie said...

So the 2.5 M-year-old ice age seems to be waning. Trend: warming.

Actually quite the opposite. All signs point to a cooling cycle, and if anything the end of the Holocene and the return of glacialization.

What range of temperatures has earth experienced since man emerged 300k yr ago?

It appears to range from a low around 11 Degrees Celsius to a high of about 19 degrees Celsius with the current temperature being about 15 degrees Celsius. The Holocene has been remarkably consistent at about 15 degrees Celsius. For about 50 million years, until the last twenty thousand years, the earth has been cooling. About 50 million years ago the earth was twice the temperature that it is today. (around 28-30 degrees Celsius.)

Lewis Wetzel said...

In John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, his old time geologists (the book was written in the 90s) complained that the new generation of geologists wanted to spend their time in front of a computer, doing models, rather than out in the field, looking at actual rockbeds and topographic features. The old time geologists seemed to think that this led the new geologists to come up with cockamamie ideas that were clearly wrong when you looked at actual rock deposits.

Lewis Wetzel said...

About 50 million years ago the earth was twice the temperature that it is today. (around 28-30 degrees Celsius.)
Yes, and there is no coherent explanation for this, or for the beginning of the advance and retreat of the glaciers 2.6 million years ago. They amount to "just so" stories.

Never-Biden Never-Putin said...

The solution to global warming is - wealthier democrats made so with our tax dollars.

More wasteful spending will certainly solve global warming.

Never-Biden Never-Putin said...

An ultra wealthy king of global warming in needed. I know - how about Al Gore?

Doug said...

Let's all slow down and type carefully, shall we? Proofread our pearls of wisdom? Gawd, I'd be embarrassed for someone from a foreign country to read this.

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