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Category: Climate
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2021-07-07

Climate Discussion Nexus picks up on an article in Market Watch which appears to be another out-of-place polemic explaining to us benighted slow-coaches how we must change the world to avert the imminent catastrophe.

"Evict short-termism from human thinking and all will be splendid. Except if you want to look before you leap, don’t, because we must act in the short term and without sober second thought: 'The window for launching a climate revolution—and achieving an inclusive recovery from COVID-19 in the process—is rapidly closing.' And if it doesn’t, the government will slam it shut with you inside just in case"

There is more of course. If you can bear to read it.

Nowadays it seems that any crisis will do, and Covid and Climate are being seamlessly merged to provide the urgent imperative to give totalitarian control over to our governments because we individually are too small and insignificant to make the required changes for ourselves - only they can do this.

Oh, and do it quickly before we wake up to what they are really up to - government of the people by the elite for the elite and devil take the little people and the hindmost.

This short piece is worth reading however (especially for millennials) because it isn't quite what it seems  - and I won't spoil their punch-line, so you will just have to read it yourself.

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Category: Climate
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2021-07-02

This rather begs the question of whether "models" are science, could be science, or can never be science.

I would suggest that to qualify as science, they should have to be incorporated into the scientific method.

The basic scientific method involves several stages, more or less as follows:

  1. Consider a problem
  2. Collect facts and data about the problem
  3. Formulate a hypothesis
  4. Make predictions using the hypothesis
  5. Test the predictions
  6. Repeat as required until it's all good
  7. Promote the hypothesis to a theory
  8. Publish everything to enable others to independently review, replicate and validate

No models in sight so far . . .

But wait! The problem usually involves a system of some kind (for example, a gravitational system) and it is often possible to create a model that implements a (possibly simplified) version of the hypothesis about how that system works, and can them imitate the system (up to a point), and can make predictions about how it would behave in specific circumstances.

So a model can be useful as a way to express the hypothesis in the form of a set of equations, and/or rules of operation, which may then be implemented as a computer program.

So we could add point 3A to the above list:

3A. Create and test a computer model that implements the hypothesis to simulate the system under investigation:

The computer model should then be tested by the person that defined it to make sure that the computer is faithfully behaving according to the specification of the model (the equations, rules, etc which are described by the hypothesis).

After this the computer code may be released for testing by the person who defined the hypothesis, who should test its performance against both the hypothesis and the real system.

If the model is required to make predictions then it should be used to make predictions about the system that can be validated against the performance of the actual system (for example, the gravitational solar system) over time.

Then it can be published (including all the computer code) for peer review and validation by independent peers as part of the total package.

Only once all these steps have been undertaken can the model really be acknowledged as a scientific representation of the workings of the system under investigation. Until then it is simply a computer encapsulation of a hypothesis which remains unproven (even if it was created by a 'scientist'!).

So bearing all that in mind:

Please review these offerings against the criteria offered above in steps 1 through 3A through 8, and form your own conclusions.

You may wish to keep a soothing cup of tea to hand . . .

 

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Category: Climate
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2021-03-01

We all read about the severe weather conditions in Texas recently, and we may have noticed various reports that this "snow" didn't melt when exposed to a flame (but did blacken). But I notice that like snow everywhere, after a few days it disappeared.

So was there any reality to this odd story? I don't know, but in view of the considerable belief that man-made weather does in fact occur all over the world (floods in China etc) maybe it's worth some consideration.

The USA Watchdog site has the story.