| Sunday,
October 10, 2010
10/10/10
The Dialog Continues, but Without
Much Profit
I expect most readers here are weary of the
extended discussion of the evidence for human caused Global Warming between
me and a Believer in another conference. You may find some of it at
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
mail/2010/Q3/mail640.html#dialog and following.
The discussion revived in that conference, although I don't find it very
profitable: I learn little. Still, I have learned a bit more about the mind
set of the AGW Believers. I had said that no, I had not read the
Physics Section of the IPCC Repor. because I was not convinced of its
reliability. I had previously been told that unless I read that report I had
no right to ask questions of those who believe. I figured that was the end
of the matter, until I saw:
saying "I won't read it, because some people
criticize it" is not useful behavior for learning.
I replied at length, again intending to end the discussion:
I have not said I will not read it because some criticize it. I have
said that I see no point in reading it since it is not trustworthy, and
that has been said by some of its purported authors. You are probably
familiar enough with the subject to be able to pick propaganda from
science, but I am not, and it seems pointless to waste skull sweat on a
paper whose very authors say it may be unreliable.
If that is the entire basis for betting a few trillion dollars on
preparing for AGW, then perhaps there needs to be another opinion.
I don't want to prolong this but I do point out that being told to do
my homework is a rather odd answer to the specific question of how one
justifies tenth of a degree accuracies in charting global warming -- it is
after all about one degree rise from 1880 to 2000 that is shown on a chart
with error bars larger than a degree for each year -- when the primary
measurements cannot possibly be accurate to better than a degree, and it
requires credulity to give them a degree accuracy. I've seen sailors read
thermometers, and I have seen the Santa Monica airport weather station and
pictures of the same location when it was first established in a bean
field. I do not believe those numbers are comparable. I do not know how
one confidently acts on one tenth of a degree changes when there doesn't
seem to be any justified measurements to a tenth of a degree. I also ask
about heat transfer from the interior of the Earth to the biosphere and I
seem to be given assumptions but few measurements. I do not know why I am
supposed to read the physics report, which appears to mix theory and
observation in ways that are fairly complex. It seems to me that those who
want us to consent to trillions of dollars investment in combating AGW
deserve explanations. Real ones, not the stuff of "An Inconvenient Truth"
which does not seem to be so thoroughly based on science as it claims to
be, and which was not denounced by the Believers when it first came out;
the flaws were admitted only when found by others. That does not give me
great confidence.
I believe that the burden of proof should be on those who assert this
prophecy of -- of what? Of sea levels in many feet per century, or merely
the continuation of a thousand year trend? That seems to change with the
times and the spokespeople. Of temperatures? I saw as much enthusiasm from
Margaret Meade and Stephen Schneider for preparing for cooling and the
possible coming Ice Age for a while there. That concensus didn't last as
long as AGW has but it was certainly there.
I would have said that science requires that those who question AGW be
given some funding, not automatically rejected by "peer review" and then
denounced because the took funding from oil companies, as if there were
other sources.
And that's enough. I had not intended to extend this discussion; but I
do not accept the assertion that I am that stupid.
The result was the following:
> I have not said I will not read it because some
criticize it. I have
> said that I see no point in reading it since it is not trustworthy,
No, what you said was that you would not read it
because (one of) its authors claimed that the executive summary did not
accurately reflect the content. So SKIP THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. This is not
an excuse for not doing your homework.
This wouldn't bother me so much, except it is
EXACTLY what I see with all the various forms of deniers-- 911 deniers,
relativity deniers, global warming deniers, even Maxwell's equation
deniers. When you point them to actual references, they will always find
some excuse or another to not actually learn anything about the science.
Yeah, somehow, there's always some really good
reason that they don't want to learn anything about the science.
I'm sure that you will come up with another excuse
for not reading it, though. They always do.
> I don't want to prolong this but I do point out
that being told to do
> my homework is a rather odd answer to the specific question of how one
> justifies tenth of a degree accuracies in charting global warming --
Pointing to a reference that discusses your question
is a "rather odd answer?" Why is that odd?
> ...I believe that the burden of proof should be
on those who assert
> this
Since you categorically refuse to read any of the
evidence, how is that even possible?
Now it may be a simple matter for a physicist to read a
physics document -- we will have tomorrow a physicist's comment on the IPCC
report -- but it is not really a simple matter for me. I have inspected the
report and I saw no obvious answers to what I thought were fairly simple
questions about data accuracies. The document
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html is
very complex, very technical, and there is no obvious way to find out how
measurements are taken or why weights are assigned; at least not obvious to
me. I am not ignorant of mathematics but I confess to having tried to
find the parts of the document that describe the actual operations performed
to get 1/10 degree accuracies in air and sea temperatures, and not being
able to find them. You could make a career of reading that document; and
since its authors have expressed a lack of confidence in the document's
editors, it seems to me that we taxpayers, who are expected to pay for the
billions that the policy recommendations would cost, are entitled to a
simpler explanation.
So I suppose this is another case of "they always do" which
means in effect that those who ask questions are not justified in asking for
a better answer? In any event, this is a good example of the attitudes
I find among Believers. They want us to accept the theory and thus the
colossal expenses involved, but the Believers have no obligation to provide
any better explanation than
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html.
I really ought to end this: it's pretty clear that the
defenders of AGW -- the Believers -- are not going to answer me other than
to refer me to
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html, which
would certainly use up more time than I have for the task.
But it would seem to me that those who demand billions have
at least some obligation to give simpler and more easily read explanations.
Of course they did: those were the summary and conclusions sections, which
even the Believers now say are unreliable. But
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html is
reliable and if you don't read that, then you have no choice but to pay up
and be quiet.
Incidentally, the warming debate reopened over the subject
of the War on Science, which supposedly is being waged by right wing
extremists (the remarks of Rush Limbaugh were the precipitating event). I
protested that the real war on science happens when science is
misrepresented as the excuse for policies not actually supported by
scientific evidence, and asked about how one gets 1/10 degree accuracies
from data that is at best 1 degree accurate. For those who want to see
how all this started, see
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
mail/2010/Q3/mail640.html#dialog and following. It will probably tell
you more than you really wanted to know.
[This is a different discussion from
the
one a few weeks ago, although there is a lot of similarity.]
======================
I developed a mild infection from a blister, and no one thinks it is
worth worrying about, but they did put me on some sulfa drugs that seem to
be sapping energy and making me sleepy in the daytimes. It's hot in Los
Angeles now and that doesn't help either. The above will have to do for
today. I'll put up a
bunch of mail now.
I do not know whether reminding people to be aware of the danger of
breast cancer does a lot of good, but it might, and it certainly does no
harm beyond inconveniencing some electrons.
==================
Dr Pournelle
"My point is the obvious one."
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q4/view643.html#Saturday
You are like Carl Friedrich Gauss. At least two
doctoral dissertations were written on mathematics that Gauss passed off
in his papers with ". . . from this, it is obvious that . . . follows."
Obvious to Gauss but not to anyone else.
Please stop doing that. What is obvious to you --
who has a doctorate in political science and much experience in politics
-- is opaque to me. Please tell me your point.
It's okay to treat me like an idiot. I've been
treated worse. I lived.
Didn't mean to be obscure. The obvious point was that it is the duty of
those who want hundreds of billions to be spent on their theories to
convince others that their science is indeed science. I note they had no
trouble producing An Inconvenient Truth, but once its flaws were pointed out
they did not replace it with something convincing that used real data.
================
Correction:
Dear Jerry,
Westinghouse is owned by Toshiba, not Toyota.
Cheers,
Bob
Thorium as a power source <http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/
2010/Q4/mail643.html#Wednesday> Chaos Manor Musings
China is building 25 Westinghouse design power
plants. Westinghouse is now owned by Toyota. The US Nuclear regulators
have not only not yet approved that design, but have yet even to consider
it.
Robert
Fixed now. Thanks.
================
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