Monday, January 10, 2011

We all know…

…how comically inaccurate the weatherman's weekly forecast usually is.

And yet we all believe global policy should be based on the forecasts of multinational weathermen for the next 30 to 100 years?



Do you hear a cow? … A rooster says…. Here is a pig…. The Devil says….

5 comments:

One Brow said...

I'm confused by your post. Do you think it's harder to predict the accumulation of a million weather events, within a specific degree of accuracy, than a single event?

Let me offer you a more simple probabalisitc example. If you roll a fair six-sided die 600 times, the probability of getting within 2% of 100 1's is very small. If you roll a fair six-sided die 6,000,000 times, the probability of getting within 2% of 1,000,000 1's is very large.

Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...

Too much math there, mathmeteer. "K.I.S.S.," I say to myself: I think the climate modeling movement is congested with more bullshit than a lot of people are willing to admit.

One Brow said...

On that, I can agree with you. Still, we need to focus on actual problems if we wish to keep our criticism accurate, don't you think?

Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...

What are the actual problems, though? That's not a purely scientific question, much less a mathematical calculation. The agenda for policy is population control and resource gradients on the globalization frontier, and the actual natural mechanism is the sunspot/climate function. Do you think the terrestrial ecosystem is as simple as six-sided die?

One Brow said...

No, I don't think the ecosystem, or even the climate, is as simple as a six-sided die. Nor do I think the natural mechanism of sunspot/climat function is sufficient to explain the latest warming trends.

Many people read their own aganda into the science. That was true when people tried to use evolutionary theory to justify the lack of a social safety net, or relativity to say there can't be real standards, or quantum theory to tp promote quackery, or global warming to promote social changes that will likely have little effect on warming. Such attempts don't falsify the science, and there are better ways to fight the bad policies than attacking the science that they are just using as a prop to begin with, especially when such attacks undercut your arguments.