View from Chaos Manor, Thursday, January 22, 2015

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

Barry Goldwater, 1964, in a speech written by Harry Jaffa

Harry Jaffa, RIP. We had not corresponded regularly since I left academia to become a full time writer, but we were close enough before that. He was a guest lecturer to my political philosophy classes, as I was to his at Claremont, and we attended several conferences together. At that time I was mostly associated with Russell Kirk and Stefan Possony, and getting more into actual politics; Harry was the intellectual inspiration of the Goldwater movement (not that the Senator was not his own man, and although he was not primarily an intellectual he certainly understood the issues.) In 1969 I was co-director of Barry Goldwater Jr.’s successful Congressional campaign and could have gone to Washington as a Congressional staffer, but I did not like the political game; Harry was one of those who advised me not to get into the political game.

Harry’s inclusion of the Cicero quote in Goldwater’s speech came as a surprise to everyone. In those days Johnson ran on a platform of being moderate, and made Goldwater look like a raving maniac eager to nuke everyone. Johnson was successful, but he also used divisive and deceitful advertising, such as the little girl and the countdown to atomic explosions. When Goldwater suggested that we ought to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos, Johnson said that was the most trigger-happy thing he had ever heard. As Johnson said that I was looking at strike photos of US strikes in Laos, but of course neither I nor Harry nor Senator Goldwater could say so. I had clearance and I suppose Harry did also (mine was from being an intelligence analyst.) I used to wonder who we were keeping it a secret from. The North Vietnamese surely knew they were being bombed, and presumably told their Russian allies… the only people it was secret from were the American people.

Over the years we had less and less contact, which is a shame. It was always a delight to discuss the Federalist Papers, which he knew intimately as I was learning about those vital documents. I thought I knew them when I got my doctorate, but not so.

We did not agree on the importance of Strauss, and with Harry’s death one of the most informed and articulate followers of Leo Strauss is gone.

The world will miss Harry, even those who never heard of him.

I went for a walk outside the house today. The sidewalk cracks are hard to ignore when you are in a walker.  Lunch time now and my schedule is not my own, more later…

It was a pleasant walk, and I look forward to many more, and longer. Tiring but that is good.

Senate Rejects Climate Measures NYT

By CORAL DAVENPORTJAN. 21, 2015

The Senate on Wednesday twice rejected measures declaring that humans are causing climate change <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> . But in the course of those votes, 15 Republicans, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted yes. Mr. Paul, who is considered a likely presidential contender next year, was joined by Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Jeff Flake of Arizona, among others. Two other potential Republican presidential candidates, Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, voted no. It was the first time in years that senators had voted on a climate change measure, and it came in the course of a debate on a bill forcing approval of the Keystone XL <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/k/keystone_pipeline/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> oil pipeline. President Obama is expected to veto the bill if it passes, as is likely, but lawmakers are using it to send their own political messages. Democrats had hoped to force Republicans on the record on the issue of climate change by introducing the two amendments.

And so the politics continue without noticeable actual science

On climate models and 0.1degree accuracies

Lies, damned lies, etc.

Jerry,

Mike of course has it correct. Measurements made by hundreds of instruments, not calibrated to a consistent standard, representing different times of day at different locations over years of time, cannot be averaged in any meaningful fashion to create a statistically meaningful grand ensemble. And of course the temperature measurements are not independent – the temperature of the water an hour later and 20 nautical miles distant is highly correlated with the temperature of the original water sample. Finally, of course, we are estimating systematic air temperature from a variety of metrics including seawater temperature for comparison with modern air temperature measurements.

Admittedly one can make corrections for all of those factors, but said corrections are of course model-dependent and hence subjective – and such corrections are one of the criticisms of the GW people in their consistently manipulating data to make the past appear cooler so as to exaggerate the effects of warming.

And of course extrapolations of such data into the future, even under the simplest of assumptions (the linear data hypothesis with uncorrelated random errors) diverge hyperbolically from the midpoint (in time as determined by the weighting of the measurements if available, assuming that the measurements are uniform in weighted error across the period), so that the forecast error diverges as (elapsed time)^2 measured from the midpoint time.

Jim

Dear Jerry Pournelle PhD,

Your blog entry today (or maybe yesterday your time) with Mike clarifying the necessity of having a "set of data that is not in statistical control" made me understand the root of the problem. Your blog is truly a source of knowledge, and more importantly a gentlemanly discussion of difficult matters. From now on I am proud to be a platinum subscriber.

Respect,

Rune Aaslid PhD

Most social science departments offer their own statistics courses because the math dept. statistics courses are too hard or require prerequisite courses. Of course this is because real statistics is hard, and requires real math. Stat in the Education Dept. or in Psychology is really cookbook stat on calculating means, and standard deviations, but has little to nothing about distributions, assumptions, or requirements for valid inferences, which is why so many “experiments” cannot be repeated even though they are “significant to the 10% level” etc.  They often mean nothing.  Alas this is true in some “hard” sciences,too. The worst of it is that many scientists who know much about physics know little about statistical inference and the assumtions in their models.  I was fortunate in that Paul Horst required me to go to the math dept for probability and statistics, which led me to operations research  which turned out to be more valuable than psych.

One reason for this journal is to encourage rational debate. I don’t presume to know everything even if I sometimes appear to pretend to, but I have many readers with great expertise.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View from Chaos Manor, Wednesday, January 21, 2015

There are two important matters today. One is the State of the Union, and the other Windows 10. The State of the Union had no surprises, and either warrants short shrift, which many have given it, or a longer thoughtful analysis, and there are plenty of them as well.

The Microsoft streaming of the show is still slow – to me anyway – and will have to wait.

Riding The Red Horse http://www.amazon.com/Riding-Red-Horse-Christopher-Nuttall-ebook/dp/B00QZD9H5K has a number of stories and essays, and is worth your buying. My non fiction contribution is an essay on simulation I did for Avalon Hill in the 70’s –and it is still pretty good. They found and asked my permission, and I am told I’ve already earned a good dinner out of it… Next I think comes a revival of There Will Be War.

.

Windows 10 looks better every time they talk about it, but we’ll have to see the implementation.

Best Windows 10 News

Jerry:

You may have already heard, but Microsoft is borrowing from the Apple playbook and offering a free upgrade to Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users for the first year.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/operating-systems/23119/windows-10-release-date-specs-and-pricing-announced

Best wishes for your continued speedy recovery,

Doug Ely

More on both of those later. Do not forget that although the official unemployment rate is low – well, 5% — there are 100 million former workers who are now not working and have given up trying. This is defining unemployment down, but they still do not have jobs and may never do so. That would be Depression most places. How long can we afford this?

Our Federal Government at Work

Roland Dobbins wrote, and you posted in Mail>

Eric Holder does something right, for once.

Mr. Dobbins is usually quicker on the uptake than that. Stop and think about what that order actually does. It stops state and local troops from gaining funds and property under Federal asset-forfeiture rules *unless the Feds are involved in the case*. I foresee a massive uptick in the number of cases the Feds are called in on, and a consequent increase in the amount of information provided to the Federal government about crimes previously handled at state and local levels.

—

Meredith Dixon

We will have to see, but centralization is one of the Democrat goals.  They used to be for States’ Rihts

All you zombies

If I may wave a small Australian flag the movie Predestination was made by two science fiction fans in a warehouse in Melbourne on a tiny budget.

They followed the story dead accurately and though they did add some extra plot they said in an interview that they had to as the original story was not enough to make a full film. Their extras are generally sympathetic and in line with the mind twisting nature of the story.i

It’s certainly not ruined, and i recommend it to you. If any one reading this does not know the story, i !d suggest reading it first as, though it is completely fair, it was a serious puzzle for my wife, who is not a fan.

try it, you’ll like it

***** David

Good.  I could live with Puppet Masters – sort of  — but Starship Troopers was too much.  Glad to see this was made by someone who likes Robert

Climate Science and Statistics

"But it is absurd to say we know the average temperature of the Earth in 1900. Ocean temperatures then were taken with a bucket and a mercury thermometer and were no more than 1 degree of accuracy if that."

Dr Pournelle, you have studied statistics; how can you come up with a statement like that?

Of course all those plus minus one degree measurements from 1900 would not have been off by the same calibration error. So your argument is not correct, one of the great ideas of statistics is that you can average out errors in individual measurements.

Still love your blog (the original!)

Rune

Well, a significant bias in the measurements can be counted out (all mercury thermometers were calibrated by 100Celcius and 0Celcius – or that is what would have been proper procedure in those days)

Moreover, the inaccuracies in the measurements should be distributed according to the Gaussian curve. (That’s basic statistics, if you disagree you have to give a good reason why)

Regarding enough measurements, I do not have the exact information but my belief is that it should be sufficient. I’ll investigate tomorrow after finishing my charitably work in cerebral hemodynamics.

Thanks Jerry for all your SF writing (have read all your books) but especially your BYTE chaos manor columns which were my greatest inspiration during the 80ties.

Your Rune

(BTW you’re absolutely right about the Greenland warming in the early middle age, I’ve flown up the valleys on the west coast of that island and seen old Norse foundations coming up where the glacier was retreating.)

Your correspondent confuses the precision of a single measurement (a fact) with the precision of the estimate of a mean (a parameter). It is not legitimate to calculate the mean of a set of data that is not in statistical control. For example, measurements taken off one production line really should not be averaged with the measurements off another production line; and even measurements taken at different times might not be usefully averaged. For example: here:

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/03/now-and-then-on-reads-that-average.html

it would be illegitimate to calculate a grand average of the paste weights to characterize the process. There was in fact no "process," no "statistical distribution" whose mean value might be estimated by the grand average.

In addition to the precision of the measurement and the standard error of the mean measurement, we must also consider that you could have an estimate of ±0.001 around the wrong value. STAT 101 professors in non-mathematical courses have a lot to answer for.

Mike

Which begins to explain what we are discussing.  Our estimates of world temperature in 1880 cannot be to 0.1 degree accuracy.  Individual ones, yes, but not of their averages, and certainly not of their weighted averages (the weights making up for missing data).  I am no statistics expert and don’t make my living at statistical inference.  Mike does. There are many reasons to question averages accurate to 0.1 degree and taken 100 years ago.

I do not think we have enough measurements from enough places to know the Earth’s temperature to any 0.1 degree  in 1880.  I do not believe we have enough to know to that accuracy NOW.

Of course the Earth is warming.  In 1776 Col. Hamilton dragged cannon across the frozen Hudson to Harlem Heights. Inn 1835 t5here were market stalls on the Thames ice in md winter. It is never that cold now –or seldom cold enough to freeze to walking thickness on either river. Of course it warmer now.  But HOW Much warmer and why? We do not know, and pretending we do is not science, and makes me fear politics.

Check out this post: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/01/2014-as-the-mildest-year-why-you-are-being-misled-on-global-temperatures/

Roy Spencer, PhD.- 2014 as the Mildest Year: Why You are Being Misled on Global Temperatures

Most of the scientists of my close acquaintance must be in that other 3%. Which means that there is a surprisingly LARGE "3%" — which means that the 97% concurrence is being fudged some kinda way.

Also, let’s see:

Admittedly it wasn’t 2014, but 2013 when the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert in the world, was hit with a record snowfall, the deepest in at least three decades.

BUT–

An Antarctic research team and their ship — AND the rescue icebreaker ship — were trapped in extensive Antarctic ice — during the Antarctic SUMMER — in 2014. (Jan 2014) The Middle East is experiencing TWO exceptionally snowy winters in a row. (Dec 2013 – Jan 2014, Jan 2015) Eastern Australia had the highest snowfall totals in at least a decade. (Jun/Jul 2014) Blizzards hit the UK in Dec 2014.

And let’s not forget the polar vortex in North America (Canada to Mexico!) AND Great Britain AND Siberia AND Northeast Asia in 2014. (Dec 2013 – Apr 2014)

So…yeah. I REALLY believe we had the warmest year on record in 2014. </sarc>

(Yes, I can provide numerous URLs to news articles on all of those if desired. Or you can simply Google.)

Stephanie Osborn

Interstellar Woman of Mystery

http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com <http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/>

OOOOoooooo.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915061/Nasa-climate-scientists-said-2014-warmest-year-record-38-sure-right.html

Stephanie Osborn

Interstellar Woman of Mystery

http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com <http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/>

That link I just sent? Quote:

"…Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much…"

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915061/Nasa-climate-scientists-said-2014-warmest-year-record-38-sure-right.html#ixzz3PJS30fx9

BUSTED.

Stephanie Osborn

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View from Chaos Manor, Friday, January 16, 2015

Monday, January 19, 2015

Friday: I am posting a stub to work on later. Larry Niven and Wendy All are to be here shortly.  (Well they got here as I was writing that.)

Monday : They were here and we worked on an old children’s book we started a decade ago. The story is complete or very nearly so, but Wendy has been so busy designing toys for Mattel that she has not completed the illustration – Now she can, and we will soon have the book ready to publish. It is a fairy tale about intelligent moles who are just discovering science and the scientific method, which they can employ in their war against the semi intelligent Weasels. A bit fantastic (but fantasies are), but it’s a pretty good story, for 8 and above kids who are not thrilled by talking sponges…

Saturday and Sunday were devoured by locusts, exercises, the exhausting drama of getting to church where Roberta sings in the choir and I sit in one of the handicap seats. I go in with the walker, which I am getting pretty good with. There are steps down into the garage that have to be taken, but the Holy Cross rehab therapists built a model of the steps when I was out there. They used little platforms, and we worked out the procedures to negotiate a double step down through a narrow doorway – down is harder than up – and all is well. Walkers work, a bit better than canes, and I got used to a cane after the cancer therapy radiation in 2008 destroyed y balance. I have got about 80% of what balance I had before the stro9ke, and now the key will be to do enough of the right exercises to be strong enough to overcome balance problems. A month in hospital even with physical and occupational therapy – they are not the same – can weaken you a lot. My advice to stroke victims is not to waste time – exercise as much as you can as early as you can.

More on that later. Thanks to all of you who renewed subscriptions or subscribed last month and this year. It is a life saver and I am catching up on the ability to type faster so I can do essays. The brain is still in here, although I wonder if the world is going mad…

Eric was here all day Saturday and we have solved a lot of the problems of computer connections.  Need  couple of fixes, but I can do the accounts and taxes down here in the old office now.  Slowly getting back to normal

I’ll post this now and start today’s essay. Stand by…

The wireless connect on this lap top is slow, but it is almost good enough

.Monday: I am going to catch up on Mail, some of which is important.

So there is mail.  Now let’s look at the day…  First I am realizing how dependent I am on the Internet working right.  It’s slow today, meaning Time Warner is slow, which is the way things were in 2004 or so before I got high speed Internet at all.  I lived with it then, now it drives me crazy.  So it goes.  What cannot be cured…  Over time these things fix themselves, and we are so much better off than we were that the improvements are the new normal.  When the Franks got to Constantinople, the Byzantines wanted to impress them with their opulence so they served them oranges and fresh vegetables in mid-winter. The height of delight available only to the wealthiest…  Now it is a right of the poor – in America.  We do not notice that most of the world does not have fresh vegetables except in harvest time. Or oranges at all.

Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right

*

* Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record.’

*

* But it emerged that GISS’s analysis is subject to a margin of error

*

* Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915061/Nasa-climate-scientists-said-2014-warmest-year-record-38-sure-right.html

ltm

‘The NASA climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.’

<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915061/Nasa-climate-scientists-said-2014-warmest-year-record-38-sure-right.html>

Roland Dobbins

hmmm

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.