I just started reading the book "Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future"
Written by two geologists, the book seems reasonably balanced. It highlights examples of bad mathematical models that have contributed to environmental disasters and also points out the inadequacies of the mathematical models upon which much of climate change science is based.
To Joel Connelly, however, any scientist who questions any bit of the scientific "consensus" on climate change might as well be a Nazi:
Global-warming skeptics make more excuses than Holocaust deniersBut at least he's above name-calling!
(And speaking of climate change models that attempt to predict the future, I expect to post an item about the research featured in this article as soon as hear back from the researchers).
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at September 19, 2007 04:17 PM | Email This(click AP below for link to story)
http://www.theolympian.com/southsound/story/216025.html
"Olympia dips into coffers to bring high-profile warming experts to town"
Posted by: AP on September 19, 2007 04:26 PMAnd I'd take the word spoken from an sedimentary rock before I would Al Gore. They may have the same personality, but the rock isn't looking to dupe millions of dollars out of partisan lemmings.
Posted by: jimg on September 19, 2007 04:26 PMI'll bet you'll get the typical knee-jerk reactions from your regulars rather than any thoughtful comments.
Looks like a book to read, from a credible author.
Posted by: BA on September 19, 2007 05:12 PMhttp://www.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/smaxwell/Page_4221/ImprimisAug07.pdf.
Posted by: tg on September 19, 2007 05:17 PM
By David W. Carnell (Wilmington, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Orrin Pilkey is not popular with coastal residents in NC because he keeps telling us our beaches are retreating and efforts such as beach renourishment are futile and expensive. He and his daughter correctly point out the flaws in modeling environmental changes with examples from fisheries management and beach erosion. Then they ruin it all by buying Al Gore's most extravagant predictions of impending rapid sea level rise, which are not supported by any scientific evidence, including even the highly politicized IPCC executive summary report.
The most amazing you'll learn from this book is that both authors are environmentalists.
Linda Pilkey-Jarvis (daughter to Orin H. Pilkey BTW) is a manager with the Spills Program at the Dept. of Ecology in Olympia. Her father is a professor (emeritus = semi-retired) at Duke who studies the geology of coast lines. He got his bachelor's degree at WSU.
As a fellow traveler (I too am a geologist) I can confirm the book's conclusions.
Too much emphasis is placed on results from numerical models by policy makers in government.
Posted by: deadwood on September 19, 2007 05:53 PMYes. Better we should base our public policies on the delusional fulminations of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Billy Kristol, and the ideological straightjacketed brigade at the Cato Institute.
That's worked out really great, hasn't it?
Posted by: Jim Maxwell on September 19, 2007 07:43 PMEco-Adventure not available since the year 1000.
If can live til the year 2030, I will be able to take Greenpeace's Sea Shepherd to the North Pole and the to see the amazing bedrock geology of central Greenland.
How do I make my reservations?
I picked one of several such reviews. I have a hunch when you are dne you will want to retract your recommendation.
Posted by: SeattleJew on September 19, 2007 08:59 PMIsn't that was water does to ground.
Can you say Grand Canyon.
If you only listen to echoes from people who think like you, how would you ever know whether what you hear and think is true?
You are certainly free to call the authors names, but in doing so you completely miss the point.
The point to reading this book is that it shows that even the true AGW believers are having doubts about the ability of these models to provide enough certainty to make decisions involving Billions of dollars of public (i.e. your) money.
The earth's temperature is increasing, but it is almost certainly caused by the sun, and not human CO2 emissions. The warming (which is real) is part of natural climate change, which humans and other species have been adapting to for eons. There will be displacement and some pain, but the disadvantages in some places will be mostly if not completely balanced by advantages in other places. Global cooling would be worse. Sea levels may rise a few feet, but not faster than people can move. Storms won't get much worse, and the best way to reduce storm deaths is to raise average incomes through globalisation and capitalism.
Kyoto would kill more people than it saves.
These global warming folks are just the latest in a long stream of Malthusian luddites and anti-free market socialists. They are as desperate as the Taliban, and for the same reasons: their ideologies are being disproved by social progress and are being left in the dust. East vs. West Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, China's adoption of market policies, the stagnation of France and Gerrmany all prove that free markets are better for the poor than planned economies.
Then Jim attacks my beloved Cato institute... Now I'm really pissed off. Jim, instead of just smearing my favorite libertarian think-tank, why don't you give us one specific example of an ideoligical straightjacket that has lead the Cato Institute into proposing a policy error?
What you call an ideological straightjacket, I call being principled. Your attack is just name-calling until you cite something specific. The Cato Institute is on YOUR side when it comes to the neocons, which was not the subject of this thread.
I'm a science teacher, so this whole consensus business really cooks me up. Science does not work by consensus. It works by experiment and observation and reproducible results. Michael Crichton covers this really well in "State of Fear." When the first scientist pointed out that the earth was round, the consensus was that it was flat. Those who push for following the consensus are trying to stifle debate and free inquiry. I used to think the left was for free inquiry, but now I know they only believe in it when it serves their agendas.
Check out YouTube for a great video that ran on BBC TV called "The Great Global Warming Swindle."
Posted by: Bruce Guthrie on September 19, 2007 09:47 PMYou're not kidding. Al Gore has bet his whole career on GW. It's going to be humorous in the next 10 to 20 years when none of the doomsday scenarios are realized, and Al Gore is the butt of many a joke. I hope he wins the Nobel Peace prize too, so that After Arafat, there will be no more doubt that The Onion controls the Nobel Awards committee.
Those scientists with much more respect for real science know that climatology is largely one big unknown. And moreover, they know that nature tends towards very few processes that run away with positive feedback. Most of nature's corrective actions involve negative feedback. It's quite possible that even if there is more GW than the minor changes we now see, that the Earth already has its own corrective action plan, honed over the eons.
But ridiculous emotional imagery of doomsday hurricanes and 20 foot sea level rise in the next few years are the stuff of Hollywood movies. And time will prove that out and prove Al Gore the fool.
Posted by: Jeff B. on September 19, 2007 09:55 PMreread MY post. Your old shark recommended the karkin book w/o reading it. I have no horse in that race at all.
Posted by: SeattleJew on September 19, 2007 10:48 PMBrad Pitt chosen for leading role in new saga, The Trojan."
Posted by: SeattleJew on September 19, 2007 10:51 PMAstronomy & Geophysics, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 1.18-1.24, Feb 2007, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-4004.2007.48118.x
Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges
" This article so far has summarized the evidence for the climatic role of cosmic rays, which underpins cosmoclimatology:
*
Observations of variations of low cloud cover correlated with cosmic-ray variations;
*
Experimental evidence for the microphysical mechanism whereby cosmic rays accelerate the production of cloud condensation nuclei;
*
The Antarctic climate anomaly as a symptom of active forcing of climate by clouds;
*
Quasi-periodic climate variations over thousands of years that match the variations in radionuclide production by cosmic rays;
*
Calculations that remove an apparent difficulty associated with geomagnetic field variations."
Article is free to download from
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/
And to their credit they abandoned Mayor Billions Billions and more Billons Tunnel mania, for a surface street option, which we can afford, but will still be under water.
Gotta love these Libs! Piss it away by the Billions!
Posted by: GS on September 19, 2007 11:30 PMThough I am a fan of free market economics, I can't claim to be an economist. Just an MBA. But you are right. There is a great analogy between the econometric models and the global warming climate models. The issue is complexity. The more complexity, the more data and the more factors the model must include. Tiny changes have large effects in a short amount of time, making the models essentially useless. (Butterfly flapping it's wings affects later hurricanes...) And then there is "garbage in, garbage out." But "of the making of models there is no end." And most of these GW scientists have a political axe to grind against the free market. They also get more grant money if their research points towards the liberal/ big government result.
In about ten years, the anthropogenic global warming folks will have egg on their faces, just like the Malthusians, Luddites and impending ice-age chicken littles of years past.
Posted by: Bruce Guthrie on September 20, 2007 08:20 AMSaw the guy at the grammies and boy did he ever have his irritating smirk going.
Joel C. tries to be nice but he can't seem to be introspective and see the hypocrisy of his statements. This article was hardly the end all of global warming anecdotal evidence.
Posted by: swatter on September 20, 2007 08:59 AMS. Fred Singer Global Warming Article
Thanks for the links to the Imprimis article by Dr Singer. It was balanced, insightful, fair-minded, and to-the-point; in short, excellent.
Dr Singer's discussion of so-called "consensus" was particularly incisive: the UN IPCC, 2500 panelists, or 52 climate scientists?; the AMS, 11,000 rank-and-file, or 12 governing board members?
Posted by: ewaggin on September 20, 2007 12:17 PMBrad Pitt chosen for leading role in new saga, The Trojan."
He's going to play a condom? Sounds like the perfect role.
But seriously, how phony can you get? If you really believed that our activities would cause "catastrophic" events including evironmental devastation, loss of habitat, and extinction of both animal, plant and human life, would you be content with symbolic measures? Prius and CFL light bulbs indeed!
It's time for these jokers to put up or shut up. I won't take any of them seriously unless they start releasing their communiques from inside a cold, dark cave.
Posted by: threeoddnumbers on September 20, 2007 01:34 PMSo, how many more pro Gore books will sharky post? Or maybe since he is an expert and has found this book balanced , he will now supprt ALgore>>
How come I do think so!
BTW did you hear the one about the Conservative and a shaggy dog?
No?
Not surprised.
Posted by: SeattleJew on September 20, 2007 09:01 PMHe should travel into British Columbia, where warmer winters in the very cold Chilcotin Plateau have allowed the mountain pine beetle to embark on what's likely to be a cross-North America killing spree.
He is stating sa fact that is, in fact, not known to be true. And I don't even mean that silly prediction about the "killing spree," but we do not know that whatever the mountain pine beetle is doing is due to warmer winters, and even to the extent we are sure about that, we don't know that those warmer winters are part of a larger pattern of global warming, which represents a mere fraction of a degree of increase over decades, which means some areas will -- as always -- see warmer winters and summers, and other places will see cooler, and neither is necessarily attributable to any particular cause or related to any pattern.
Saying our warmer winters (which were colder just a few years ago) are related to global warming is, at best, a guess.
The proper comparison -- even if you fully believe in significant anthropogenic global warming -- is not critics to Holocaust deniers, because we had actual facts that proved the Holocaust existed. It's that simple. And to claim something is unassailable fact that even the IPCC says may not be true is to lie.
Posted by: pudge on September 22, 2007 08:47 AM