Robert Reich Gets It

Now we are getting somewhere. 

I guess economists don't count Robert Reich as serious, but political scientists, I think, do. So maybe the light is starting to dawn in Punditia.

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin. More on this to come.

Would be a Nice Tool

The Nature Conservancy has some global change projections available at http://www.climatewizard.org/index.html

It's a nice looking page. Unfortunately, the attention to presentation exceeds the attention to detail. Several model views are available as well as an ensemble average, but the latter is identical to the HadCM output.

Hope this gets fixed soon so we can have a little more confidence in what we are looking at. I have contacted them with a bug report.

Change

http://imgur.com/gallery/1b89I

Bug Report

http://xkcd.com/258/

To clarify: I feel the same way xkcd (aka Randall Munroe) does about conspiracy theories in general.

I mention it here because I was specifically thinking about the idea that there is a vast conspiracy of scientists to convince people of the otherwise absurd idea that there might be some problem about releasing too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and to squelch any arguments to the contrary.

Instead of, you know, overwhelming evidence.

Inexcusable Austin/Singer/Lindzen Letter

The denialist sites are all over this  open letter signed by a bunch of physicists and emeriti including Singer and Lindzen. My comments are in green.

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES: YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

Obviously. But by whom?

You have recently received an Open Letter from the Woods Hole Research Center, exhorting you to act quickly to avoid global disaster. The letter purports to be from independent scientists, but that Center is the former den of the President's science advisor, John Holdren, and is far from independent. This is the same science advisor who has given us predictions of “almost certain” thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time.

Great! Let's keep up the good work of avoiding the various pitfalls, then, shall we?

The facts are:

The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

Shameless bastards. These are Ph.D.s; they should understand the possibility of cherrypicking from a noisy record. The earth is not cooling in any way that isn't just an argumentative artifice.

The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? 

Weather is not climate. Can Lindzen really have sunk to the point that he is willing to sign this? 

We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact

THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN'T EXIST.

That is news to most of us. What is all this evidence-shaped stuff in the journals, then, anyway?

The proposed legislation would cripple the US economy, 

How do you know? It's those infallible economic models isn't it?

putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors. 

Why? Is the US so decadent by now that we can't compete on energy technology? I think we should be future oriented, not become one of those declining societies holding on to a vanishing past.

For such drastic action, it is only prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not just computer projections, and not false claims about the state of the science.

What do you mean by "genuine"? Would ANYTHING satisfy you?

SCIENCE IS GUIDED BY PROOF, NOT CONSENSUS

Consensus is a key mechanism for the advancement of science. That is how it works. 

And proof? Well, here's a funny thing. Science NEVER PROVES ANYTHING ABOUT NATURE! You can only prove things ABOUT MODELS OF NATURE. And models, well, either they are fit for purpose or they aren't. 

I am absolutely stunned that a bunch of Ph.D. scientists are promoting this essentially ignorant idea of what science is. Even if climatology really is bathwater...

This is nothing short of treachery toward science. Every one of these people must know that science is not about proof. This one has me absolutely slack-jawed. I understand polemicists undermining science in the name of their pet cause. For scientists to join them is very strange.  

Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Alarmists are rolling in wealth from the billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken. 

Hey, George Soros, where's my check, dammit? 

It is always instructive to follow the money.

Something I can agree with at last. Follow the damned money.

Really, the opposition gets more shameless each year than you could even have imagined the year before.

Age discrimination

I find it interesting that age discrimination is frowned upon in most situations but celebrated in science. It's a bit demoralizing now that I am on the losing side of the proposition, but I can see both sides of the argument. 

What's odd is how science is so explicit and comfortable about age constraints that would not be acceptable elsewhere. 

Talk (by Me): Cybernetics of Climate July 1

I'm giving this talk July 1 at 6:30 PM as part of the Austin Forum at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin.

Y'all come. Directions and details here.

If anyone is interested in seeing me present this talk in your town, please contact me.

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Cybernetics of Climate

You're invited to a discussion session entitled "Cybernetics of Climate" presented by Dr. Michael Tobis, Research Scientist Associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. at The University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Tobis's presentation will focus on climate change as an example of whether, when and how computing can influence policy.

As human activity changes the composition of the global atmosphere at an unprecedented pace, human society is faced with unprecedented challenges. We have to determine to what extent the changes matter, and by when. Some argue that the risks of excessive policy response are as large as or larger than the risks of inadequate policy response. One of the unique aspects of the problem is that the conditions being predicted have no historical or paleontological analogy. We are entering new territory, and are forced to make projections based only on scientific principles, without any direct observations.

Most progress in engineering relies to some extent on doing exactly this sort of extrapolation. The assistance of high performance computers is crucial in developing most new technologies these days, from spacecraft to medicines.

How well do these techniques apply to predicting the future of the earth as a physical system? Climate simulations often take center stage in public discussions about climate change, but how should these computations be understood? Is the climate system well enough characterized to rely on models? If not, how should that affect what we do about it?

Dr. Tobis will offer a tour of how computers and computations are used in addressing our planet's future and some ideas as to the strengths and limitations of these approaches.

Michael Tobis started his career as an electrical engineer with a focus in statistics. As a graduate student, he built one of the first multicore computers and used it to run ocean simulations using code he himself developed. Since his doctorate in climatology, he has been focusing on climate computation, at Argonne National Laboratory, at The University of Chicago, and now at The University of Texas at Austin.

Update: Changed the posting date to move this to the top, to remind people in commute distance of this.