Cobb: Are we moving toward a fact-free future?

[seahorse3]

I find it hard to believe so many got the simple math problem wrong. I'm terrible at math but immediately knew the answer, so not sure I believe the "fact" that 50% of MIT students got it wrong. Can we fact check that please?

What rockdoc says makes sense to me. It seems to this layman that our reliance on technology has replaced using our minds for problem solving. I don't know if the models cause problems in science by trying to bend facts to meet the model (normalcy bias), but people suffer from normalcy bias in general and I'm not sure why "scientist" would be immune to this- that's essentially why we have peer review right? Further, models are certainly causing a lot of problems in economics, algorithm trading etc leading to crashes etc so our reliance on models to be predictive is misplaced, the model is limited and the limiting factor is always the quality of the info and assumption built into the model- models suffer from normalcy bias.

[vision-master]

Post-2012 Earth Changes

A Global Climate Change Remote-Viewing Study
Multiple Realities, Timelines, and Events

Introduction: We at The Farsight Institute are currently engaged in a fascinating study using remote viewing to study climate and planetary change between the years 2008 and 2013. The initial results appear dramatic on a global scale, and our research does indeed suggest that major global change is a possibility between now and 2013. However, web site visitors are reminded that this is research, not certitude. Remember what Albert Einstein once said, "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" Web site visitors are encouraged to examine all of our results carefully, and learn with us as we complete this experiment in mid-2013. We will not fully understand these remote-viewing data until the experiment is completed at that time.

How we obtain these results is a bit complicated, but it is worth the effort to understand our methods. The actual types of global change is discussed in the second part of the video presentation below, but the first part of this presentation is absolutely essential to understand how these results were obtained. Web site visitors should watch both parts of the video presentation. This presentation was given during the 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Boulder, Colorado in June 2010.

This is the most carefully collected set of professional-grade remote-viewing data involving this time span that currently exists. This experiment is potentially one of the most significant experiments ever attempted using remote viewing as a data-collection platform.

In general, these remote-viewing data suggest the following types of physical changes across many of the above geographical locations by mid-2013:

1.Impacts from what appear to be large meteors leading to tsunamis and possible volcanism
2.Extensive and forceful flooding of coastal areas
3.Excessive solar radiation
4.Storms and other severe weather

In terms of the effects of these changes on humans, these data also suggest:
1.Massive self-organized relocation from coastal areas (refugees)
2.The breakdown of rescue or other notable governmental functioning
3.The breakdown of the food supply system
4.The breakdown of the vehicular transport system
5.Extensive loss of buildings near coasts

1.The U.S. Space Shuttle will launch its last mission in mid-2011. At that time, NASA is entirely abandoning its government-funded manned spaceflight program. Given the investment that the U.S. has made in launching humans into space since the 1960s, this is odd, especially since private efforts to launch humans into space are years away, and currently unproven. It is as if the government does not anticipate being able to launch humans into space in the near future for reasons not currently stated.

2.The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is being sealed in 2011. This will allow the world to restart agriculture given a global catastrophe. The United Nations formally inspected the facility, which might seem odd for a Norwegian project. The timing of this project seems like a strange coincidence.

3.U.S. and global debt. It is as if various governments are not expecting to have to pay back their debts, perhaps anticipating a global economic reset due to reasons not currently stated.

4.The devaluing of the U.S. dollar seems to be a trend that will stay. Moody, Standard and Poor, and Fitch have announced that they may be devaluing the rating of U.S. Treasury bonds (see NY Times article, 15 March 2010, as well as the editorial on 20 March 2010), and there have been discussions within the United Nations of the International Monetary Fund phasing out its dependency on the U.S. dollar. The governments seem to be acting as if the U.S. dollar will be replaced as the global currency.

5.Digging, digging is everywhere. The U.S. has no nuclear enemies, yet it is digging huge underground facilities in inhospitable regions difficult for the masses to reach. Why? On the other hand, the Chinese tend to think collectively, and China is digging extraordinary subway complexes under most of its major cities in a crash program that seems odd in terms of timing and scope. See, for example, the NY Times article by Keith Bradsher, 27 March 2009. Subways are, of course, conveniently located underground tunnels, and such tunnels could house millions of people in an emergency. Russia announced in 2011 that it is adding 5,000 new nuclear bomb shelters in Moscow, enabling it to protect all of Moscow's residents. The program is to be rushed so that it is finished in 2012. Why? Russia has no nuclear enemies. Russia's new subway systems have also been placed deeper than needed so that they can be used as deep emergency shelters. Again, why? Why all these preparations, and why the rush?

6.NASA is now predicting that the Sun may generate unprecedented solar storms for a lengthy period in 2012-13. We cannot accurately predict Earth's normal weather a week in advance, and it is by no means clear how NASA can do this with respect unprecedented weather on the Sun years in advance. They are saying that we are more dependent on vulnerable computer technology now. But we had similar dependencies in 2001 and 1990 when previous 11-year solar cycles hit. What is different about the current cycle? Some might suggest that NASA is acting as if it has some extra information that is not currently stated.



Post-2012 Earth Changes
A Global Climate Change Remote-Viewing Study
Multiple Realities, Timelines, and Events

http://www.farsight.org/demo/Demo2008/R ... Page1.html

[dissident]

Er, I had to struggle with the math
A bat and a ball cost 110 cent together and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
x + Y = 110, Y= 100 + x. Y=110- x 110-x = 100 +x 2x= 110 - 100 2x = 10 x = 5.

However, the "science " presented at the NC legislature is not quite so algebraic. Its a model, based on data, that had not fit the model so far. My preference is for a bit more data that fits the model, or a model that better represents the data. Asking "are we moving toward a fact-free future" based on ill fitting models, is manipulation of data. Not a fact-free future.

The models have a basis in historical evidence and accepted scientific theory. To ignore them is to ignore those facts. They need not be perfect, as most projections are not, to indicate a reliable certainty as to the outcome.

It's more correct to say that the models are based on fundamental governing equations much like those of Maxwell. You can chose not to believe in Maxwell's equations or the Navier-Stokes equations. But then you would be a loon who thinks, for example, that gravity is an opinion and not an objective fact. There is way too much subjectivism being spread by the mass media that loves quoting social "science" research. Reality is not in the eye of the beholder and if you jump off a cliff and pretend the rocks below are not there you still die splattered all over them.

[vision-master]

Why do you wake up before hitting the ground?

[rockdoc123]

It's more correct to say that the models are based on fundamental governing equations much like those of Maxwell. You can chose not to believe in Maxwell's equations or the Navier-Stokes equations. But then you would be a loon who thinks, for example, that gravity is an opinion and not an objective fact.

that isn't the point at all. Having various factors built into an equation that are based on proven theory is merely a starting point. The problems arise in complex systems when you do not account for all of the possible variables or you put too much emphasis on certain variables or you put too little emphasis on other variables. In climate models this is referred to simplistically as forcings. The models by their very nature are non-unique, that is to say that a number of models with different forcings and feedbacks can produce the same result. The non-uniqueness of the solutions means that the predictive capabilities of such models are quite poor.

Coincidently there is a nice two part discussion on climate models by Ross McKitrick in the National Post
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/13/junk-science-week-climate-models-fail-reality-test/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/20/climate-reality-check/
In this discussion he points to a paper published last year in Journal of Forecasting that compared the outputs of various climate models with a mathmatical random walk where future data is predicted mathematically from the last data point. The random walk approach was found to actually be at least as good a predictor of outcomes than current climate models. In part two of the discussion he points to a paper he and a colleague recently published in Climate Dynamics entitled: Evaluating Explanatory Models of the Spatial Pattern of Surface Climate Trends using Model Selection and Bayesian Averaging Methods. What they found was:

We then tried a so-called “encompassing” test, which asks if each of the 22 GCMs does such a good job explaining the climate data that the socioeconomic data can be ignored, or vice versa. In all 22 cases the probability that you could leave out the socioeconomic data was computed as zero. But only in three of 22 cases did the data say you should keep the GCM, and in one of those cases the fit was negative (opposite to the observed patterns), so it didn’t count. So, again, only two of 22 climate models demonstrated enough explanatory power to be worth retaining, but in all 22 cases the data gave primary support to the socioeconomic measures the IPCC insists should not be used.

Then we estimated a weighted combination of the two types of models and asked if the socioeconomic data should be given all the weight, some, or none at all. The data never rejected the option of giving all the weight to the socioeconomic model, and always rejected giving it none.

Finally, we used Bayesian methods to check if the climate models might work better in some new super-model consisting of an unknown linear combination of some or all of the 22 GCMs, with a linear combination of some or all of the socioeconomic variables. Our data set yields 537 million such combinations, so we employed a computational method that searched over the entire model space and estimated the probability that each of our variables belongs in the overall, best model.

This approach identified the optimal combination as consisting of three of the seven socioeconomic variables and three of the 22 GCMs. The rest, it said, could be ignored. Redoing the encompassing tests confirmed that these variables contained all the relevant information in the data set. So we conclude that a valid model of the pattern of temperature changes at the Earth’s surface requires both measures of data contamination induced by regional socioeconomic variations and some climate-model processes.

There is a plethora of published papers in various climate journals that address problems with the current GCMS, where the shortcomings are and what needs to be improved. This is, of course, good science, identify the issues and try to solve them, retest and reiterate the process. However, the current philosophy seems to be that no matter how poor a predictive tool the models actually are they are being put out there as the incontrovertible truth.

Richard Lindzen has just published a paper that delves into the issue of models and he attempts to take a more simplistic approach by looking at forcings and feedbacks on their own. The paper is pay-walled unfortunately.

R.S. Lindzen, 2102: Climate physics, feedbacks, and reductionism (and when does reductionism go too far?). Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2012) 127: 52 DOI 10.1140/epjp/i2012-12052-8

I think the first paragraph in the introduction speaks to the topic at hand:

The public perception of the climate problem is somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand, the problem is perceived to be so complex that it cannot be approached without massive computer programs. On the other hand, the physics is claimed to be so basic that the dire conclusions commonly presented are considered to be self-evident. Consistent with this situation, climate has become a field where there is a distinct separation of theory and modeling. Commonly, in traditional areas like fluid mechanics, theory provides useful constraints and tests when applied to modeling results. This has been notably absent in current work on climate. In principle, climate modeling should be closely associated with basic physical theory. In practice, it has come to consist in the almost blind use of obviously inadequate models.

[dinopello]

My first job was as a research engineer developing commercial empirical modelling software (computer inductive reasoning). On the title page of the user's manual, we had this quote:

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work - that is correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple.”
― John von Neumann

[dorlomin]

I find it hard to believe so many got the simple math problem wrong. I'm terrible at math but immediately knew the answer, so not sure I believe the "fact" that 50% of MIT students got it wrong. Can we fact check that please?

Its because that is how the mind is meant to work. You are custom designed to use predefined patterns to sort through the myriad problems that come at you all the time every day. You have a basic template for how to deal with a "costs $1.10, part a is $1 more than part b", you are designed to take a very quick look at this and see the basic arithmetic problem that leads people to pull the basic arithmetic answer out for it.

Every day you encounter thousands of minor problems that you need to solve without involving your conscious, the conscious mind is slow to work and takes alot of resources, if you used it for every problem you would be slow, deliberate, accurate but not get much done.

People who have encountered a similar problem before may have retained a problem solving pattern that they can grab for a quick solution.
Others may instinctively realize that anything that seems so simple in the context the problem is presented is likely to have a hidden issue and slow down and think carefully about where the trick may lie.
But most will look quickly, think they recognize the problem and apply a simple pattern to solve it freeing their mind for the next problem to come along.

To design a psychological test that was more accurate in testing weather people could solve this I think they would need to be sat down, presented with a couple of other tricky questions then given this one so they were already on guard, otherwise all we get is a well known phenomena of using the path of least resistance to solve a problem.

I really think that the reason people do not take other scientific issues more seriously is a completely different type of problem. We only have so much time, so when assessing information we usually do the least thinking over sources we trust the most. For a great many people (clearly not all) their beliefs on issues like the national debt, climate change, peak oil will tend to strongly reflect the views of the most trusted sources.

Few have the time and skill to deconstruct the arguments.

[dohboi]

Thanks for linking this, Pops. I'm a big fan of Kurt Cobb, as well as John Cobb, his dad, I believe, who cowrote a book with Herman Daly on no-growth economics.

I think we are seeing examples of promoters of that fact-free future (nice alliteration there!) right here on this thread.

[AgentR11]

His example of believing the NWS on weather records may not be the best because I'd think there are other observations to review,

Not weather records, climate predictions. Their weather records are easy to test; a $200 mini station will spit out numbers good enough to compare. As a result, I have quite a bit of confidence in their accuracy.

I was talking about the models they use to predict future climate, and how impossible it is for anyone to do anything other than "wait and see". eg, the models say, ENSO positive is coming next. The only thing I can do is choose to believe, or choose to disbelieve. I have nothing other than "appeal to authority" type basis upon which to choose; and I find that terribly unsatisfying.

[rockdoc123]

People who have encountered a similar problem before may have retained a problem solving pattern that they can grab for a quick solution.
Others may instinctively realize that anything that seems so simple in the context the problem is presented is likely to have a hidden issue and slow down and think carefully about where the trick may lie.
But most will look quickly, think they recognize the problem and apply a simple pattern to solve it freeing their mind for the next problem to come along.

definitely the problem of having a supercomputer unlike anything created to date sitting in your cranium.
This is a problem I've run into all the time, first when writing technical papers for publication and later in trying to proof read 10K submissions, documents for the SEC or other gov't bodies and commercial contracts. The mind tends to scan over a sentence in a paragraph and miss incorrect numbers, spelling errors etc. How I got around this is I eventually read everything backward, sentence by sentence. By doing this your brain is forced to concentrate on individual words and numbers and it makes it less likely you will miss an error. It is interesting that I do not run into this problem when reading French or Spanish documents I think mainly because my level of fluency is much less than in english and hence I tend to slow down and concentrate on particular phrases to make sure I understand what is being said.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.
Ray Kurzweil

[kublikhan]

Depends on what your definition of climate change is. If it adheres to Pielke Sr’s definition which is basically the fact that , well climate changes and there are a host of controlling factors then yes I agree with you….but if you are suggesting a definition that equates climate change with AGW then you are dead wrong. In fact there is a host of empirical evidence that points to major discrepancies between what that model would predict versus what has happened and is happening with climate. As I’ve pointed out numerous times there is no direct evidence for AGW, it is all modeled based on theory and those models produce non-unique solutions which means they can not be proofs.

In each of the cases you spoke of scientists continued to test the theories and continued to refine them….there was no huge swell of scientists arguing the science was settled it was business as usual for the scientists involved….theorize, test, re-theorize and test again. This was in fact the way climate science progressed up until the late nineties when it all went sideways.

Before everything went sideways, what was the general consensus back in the 90's for an explanation of the unusual climate phenomenon observed? Is there an alternate climate model than AGW which better fits the empirical evidence? If so, do you have any suggested reading on it? I am not really interested in sources that merely poke holes in AGW, but rather an alternate theory that fits the data.

Also, I assume you agree with the observed data listed in my initial post from NASA. The point of contention is that you are arguing that it could be caused by a host of factors other than AGW?

[PrestonSturges]

quod erat demonstrandum

Oooo, you speak French!

[AgentR11]

Sheesh, I can barely manage English. My wife speaks several languages, including French, but me, I'm stuck with my mix of coonass and Texican, producing a very odd version of English which includes words like tacqueria, ahi, and crawdad, not to mention the abomination that is spoken as "Rio Grande River".

nb, for the humor impaired, someone asked what QED meant, I provided what it stood for. Basically it means, "tada, proof is done, I go have cookie now."
(and its Latin, not French.)

[rockdoc123]

Before everything went sideways, what was the general consensus back in the 90's for an explanation of the unusual climate phenomenon observed? Is there an alternate climate model than AGW which better fits the empirical evidence? If so, do you have any suggested reading on it? I am not really interested in sources that merely poke holes in AGW, but rather an alternate theory that fits the data.

If you just plough through the literature that goes from about 1980 through to 1998 you will see there were lots of researchers looking at all sorts of areas of climate science including solar impacts, green house gases, Atlantic Oscillation, ENSO etc. It was largely discussed amoungst themselves and argued at technical meetings such as American Geophysical Union annual meeting. It was the first IPCC meeting that started things in a politicized direction and opened up the gov't coffers for such research.
I will look through what I have and see if there are some good summary papers. But there was never a consensus and I would argue there isn't really one now....the press and certain scientists with beneficial interests would like you to believe there is one.

Also, I assume you agree with the observed data listed in my initial post from NASA. The point of contention is that you are arguing that it could be caused by a host of factors other than AGW?

My own viewpoints aren't far off the mainstream of scientists who are skeptical.
Yes temperatures rose from about 1980 to 2000, but since then they haven't risen and the point often missed is they rose and fell in the earlier part of the twentieth century as well.
Yes CO2 has continued to rise, but it has continued to rise for the last decade while temperatures have remained more or less flat.
Sea level is rising but one needs to be careful of how it is measured and whether or not proper corrections for eustacy and isostacy are being applied. Often these measurements are overplayed simply because the correction wasn't made (hence the argument by a number of people of sea level rise around pacific islands which are in fact subsiding). Relative sea level rise is the operational term.
Arctic ice is thinning partly due to warming of ocean waters but also do to adverse wind patterns. It shouldn't be surprising that ice would be retreating as we are still coming out of a glaciation. Although Arctic sea ice is decreasing Antarctic sea ice is actually increasing slightly.
The cause of all of this is obviously a combination of factors but my argument is the sensitivity applied to CO2 (and hence CO2 being the main important forcing) is overstated. The paleo literature which clearly establishes a lag time of several hundred years between temperature and CO2 is also often ignored. Feedbacks are not well understood and it needs to be emphasized that the IPCC dire predictions for end 2100 temps requires CO2 positive feedbacks, without them temperature increase is minimal. The impact of AO and ENSO are not handled properly in models at this time and some would argue they are more important drivers in climate than GHGs.

[kublikhan]

Then in your opinion, has it been a waste of time and resources to try and mitigate GHG emissions? Ignoring the price of coal/natural gas for the moment, as well as other emissions like NOx, so2, etc, it is a bad idea to tear down our old coal power plants and replace them with natural gas or new coal plants with scrubbers? Should we forge ahead with extracting all of the economical fossil fuels we can get our hands, ignoring GHG emissions?

[dohboi]

Thanks for the post, pops. Kurt Cobb usually has something interesting to say.

[dorlomin]

Arctic ice is thinning partly due to warming of ocean waters but also do to adverse wind patterns. It shouldn't be surprising that ice would be retreating as we are still coming out of a glaciation.

I am trying to stay out of this and not turn an interesting thread into yet another rerun of the same tired old arguments.

But this is so obviously wrong that I just cant shut my mouth.

Over the past 11000 years the earth should have been cooling very significantly. We were coming out of the glaciation the 11000 years before that true enough, but the process should long ago have reversed.



There are three main variations in the earths tilt and orbit that modulate glaciation\ deglaciation. Over about 22000 years the precession of the perihelion is very important. That is the earths orbit is eliptical (it varies between being eliptical and more rounded over a period of 100 000s of years). About 11000 years ago the earth was closest to the sun during the nothern hemisphere summer. Nothern hemisphere is key because it has the most landmass where snow can lie and thick glaciers can form. The summer is key because the cooler the summer the further south a snowpack can lie and begin to form glaciers. As the earth got closer to the sun during NH summer the glaciers were slowly melted back over 1000s of years, the melt back of glaciers reduced the amount of energy reflected into space and allowed the earth to warm up and the atmosphere to hold more water vapor. A rough cross over point happened about 8-6000 years ago when the increasing distance from the sun during NH summer and the melting of glaciers meant the recent warm period, the Holocene reached its warmest. We have been cooling since then. The energy difference at the equator between SH and NH summers is not small, its is roughly 1411wm^-2 and 1329wm^-2 respectively c. 6% difference.

You can all argue about the climate, but you cant argue with astronomy.

[smiley]

@dorlomin, @rockdock

With due respect, but you just demonstrated what is troubling me about the whole GW debate. When the issue came up my first reaction was to ignore this tread, however I do feel compelled to react.

Disclaimer I am by no means a specialist in GW.

My personal stance is that something is happening to the climate and that that is going in a direction and at a pace that warrants attention. And I am more than willing to admit that human activity must have an influence on the environment.

But what is troubling me that I find the current hypotheses all rather shallow, gut feeling is that we're still missing some important parts of the puzzle.

What is compounding to this problem is that on the different sides of this debate, people are dug so deep in their trenches that the debate reaches almost a religious intensity.

And to me it seems there is little incentive to providing real insights outside of the established positions. Moreover the scientific method and the basic principles of fact finding seem to have been abandoned in a lot of the research surrounding GW. Al Gore is a politician, he can be forgiven, but when a scientist shows a graph showing two lines moving in roughly the same direction (CO2, T) and claiming that is proof of causality, well it makes my stomach turn.

Same goes for the debate. People are throwing the same arguments at each other over and over again,until it starts to look like a slapstick boxing scene. And woe, to those who bring in a new viewpoint, they get hit from both sides.

So how do we get out of this?

[Lore]

It bares repeating, because we don't know everything that doesn't mean we don't know something's and we know enough to understand that we have a real and fatal problem in development. The level of intensity is proportional to the seriousness of the issue. This isn't cheering on your favorite baseball team.

[AgentR11]

So how do we get out of this?

We don't, and its irrelevant anyway.

If AGW is not causing massive climate change, we will do nothing about it.
If AGW is causing massive climate change, we will do nothing to stop it.