A long series on climate change

[W. Rabbit]

Yeah OK...meanwhile tic toc tic toc...

Why did I just have to scavenge gasoline for a week and dig my friends out of sand pits where their houses once stood, Cullion?

See you have to give me some slack brother.

I am struggling still between the science of climate change, which is of course never 100% settled, and the raw energy of the ($60B+) weather event I just survived, something no one could remember ever seeing the likes of.

Do we get hurricanes? Sure. Is AGW making them worse? Possibly.

Can we survive many $60B weather events? No.

If AGW in any way contributed to just 1% of the monster storm I witnessed, it just cost the American taxpayer $600M in real dollars.

That may not be very scientific, but it's still true.

[Cullion]

Yeah OK...meanwhile tic toc tic toc...

Why did I just have to scavenge gasoline for a week and dig my friends out of sand pits where their houses once stood, Cullion?

Terrible things like that happened just as often 50 years ago.

Here's the raw NOAA dataset.

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/ushurrlist.htm

This is a graph of the data plotted by somebody who believes in AGW and blogs about it. Note tp JohnnyCache: The fact that I'm citing somebody who disagrees with me doesn't change the shape of this graph. okay ?



There's no doubt about how traumatic and costly it was, but to think of accepting AGW as a way of hedging your bets without good evidence is dangerous in various ways that aren't immediately obvious.

The proposition being put to you is somewhat like a Pascal's Wager, where we're asked to assume that believing in God if he doesn't exist is harmless, but not believing in God, if he happens to exist, means you go to hell. If you accept those assumptions, then you ought, if prudent, to believe in God just in case. So shouldn't we all believe in God?

Of course, Pascal's wager isn't a good reason to believe in God, and I'm sure you intuitively understand why. It's not reasonable to assume that believing in God is risk free, it's not clear which version of the God myth you're actually supposed to believe in, and even if you could identify one myth more likely than the others it may still be so vanishingly unlikely that it's simply not worth spending the rest of your life suffering the boredom of attending regular religious services, or having to take on weird and arbitrary dietary restrictions or prejudices against other lifestyles.

In this case, we're talking about making food and transportation and heating your home and everything that needs to be heated or transported considerably more expensive. We're talking about giving billions and billions of public funds to a range of unaccountable bodies who claim to have solutions to a problem they haven't even really defined. These kinds of economic burdens are real costs.

The money we're talking about doesn't just get taken away from distant rich people, it gets taken away from all of us and it's money we cannot spend on other more useful things.

It's natural to be swayed by traumatic natural events like you experienced, must be able to see that the emotions of the time are going to have a warping effect on your ability to judge rational long-term costs and probabilities ?

[JohnnyCache]

So if someone in this thread was an experience climatologist who'd not yet published, they'd be "not a scientist" for your purposes? Bill Nye holds several mechanical patents, and has been responsible for at least one pretty decent advance in jet engine technology - is that not "science" because it wasn't peer-reviewed?

Also, is going through peer review enough, or does it matter what the peer review says?

Why does the scientific consensus matter to you when fencing people out, but not when you're standing on a house of cards made of the claims of people in poor standing with their peers? Then, suddenly, the peerage is a conspiracy and iconclasty is a virtue?

As far as testibility goes, we have exactly one accessible earth-like planet to study. Until we have another, or one where we control time, models based on available data are all we have.

If the weather system goes full on crazy, will you be standing in the wind, salt water up to your ankles, holding your hat, going "Yeah but is it repeatable?"

[JohnnyCache]

Because I could find the same chart on a myriad other servers. It simply doesn't matter that that instance of the image happened to be hosted on a site which also includes crank material about creationism.

Is it that you actually don't believe that's what the real UAH data ? Or is it that you think the real UAH data because falsified when somebody who is a crank hosts it on their website.

The first assertion is very easy for me to disprove, the second assertion would be insane on your part.

The dataset used to make the graph and the methodology for collecting it could probably resolve this.

[Cullion]

So if someone in this thread was an experience climatologist who'd not yet published, they'd be "not a scientist" for your purposes?

I tell you what, let's make a call when that actually happens. How about that ?

As far as testibility goes, we have exactly one accessible earth-like planet to study. Until we have another, or one where we control time, models based on available data are all we have.

No they aren't. We have the models, and we have observations. And when the models and observations don't agree (after lots of checking instruments etc..), then the observations win. That's how science really works. There's no sanity in clinging to a failed model on the basis that it's all you have. When it fails, you have to build a better one. If you think that better model already exists, tell me what it's predictions are and we'll have a wager, yes ?

If the weather system goes full on crazy, will you be standing in the wind, holding your hat, going "Yeah but is it repeatable?"

If it's basically not any warmer in 25 years than it is now, the climate refugees from missing pacific islands still haven't materialised and the kind of burdens being discussed put millions of American workers into unemployment, and the money gets shown mostly be funding ridiculous impractical green energy schemes backed by the likes of Goldman Sachs and former Enron executives who don't seem to give a **** about their personal energy use, how will you feel ?

Look, there's a way of deciding this that doesn't have to be a political argument. It's called the scientific method. Talk to me about which set of predictions you believe over some defined time period, and we'll take a bet on the temperature or hurricane landfall in the US over that time period. Yes ?

[JohnnyCache]

Don't you see how circular your argument is?

We can't spend money to study if it's happening and what to do about it, because we don't know if it's happening and what to do about it! How do i know this? because there's not a mountain of data from the nonexistent research I don't feel should be funded, but need to make my decision!

The scientists I follow agree warming is happening, but differ as to how much, why, and what the impacts are, so we should clearly stop caring and all get tax refunds!

All exoneration of those I criticize are invalid, because of relationships and buddy bias, but those I support? In their case I will ignore their relationships and conflicts of interest and parrot "look at the data"

[Cullion]

The dataset used to make the graph and the methodology for collecting it could probably resolve this.

The raw data is available from the University of Alabama at Huntsville here:-

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

This is the page of the research group that produces the dataset

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/

I doubt if I will be able to answer any of your doubts as well as they can, but I am happy to try.

[Cullion]

Don't you see how circular your argument is?

We can't spend money to study if it's happening and what to do about it, because we don't know if it's happening and what to do about it! How do i know this? because there's not a mountain of data from the nonexistent research I don't feel should be funded, but need to make my decision!

The scientists I follow agree warming is happening, but differ as to how much, why, and what the impacts are, so we should clearly stop caring and all get tax refunds!

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't fund study of the climate, the kind of burdens I'm objected to are orders of magnitude larger than scientific research budgets.

[JohnnyCache]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...nd-429764.html

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Ellesmere/

(ice shelf breakup, incidentally, is a poorly modeled factor - older models assumed ice would melt in situ, but it turns out the shelves crumble into floes)

[JohnnyCache]

You keep saying you don't dispute this and or that - only the magnitude of response.

what's that saying, "the facts of your vocation are in evidence, ma'am, and now we are merely negotiating on price?"