Low-pressure adiabatic popcorn popping.
Cool.
Category Archives: Mathematics
The California Water Problem
It would be a non-problem, if we weren’t being completely economically irrational about it. But hey, it’s California. We’re economically irrational about energy and transit, too.
Learning To Code
It’s never too late. Silicon Valley is going to have to get over its ageism.
Burke Versus Spock
Some thoughts on transhumanism and rationality.
Lunar Operations
Interesting session at the Improving Space Ops Workshop in Pasadena. Heard a talk on long-lived stable lunar orbits with max eclipse time of four hours. Now listening to a proposed cubesat mission to map hydrogen at the lunar poles.
Judith Curry’s Testimony
Congress had some follow-up questions:
1. President Obama has warned that, “for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.” He said we must “choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it is too late.”
A. Is there an overwhelming judgment of science or any science, showing that the President’s regulatory actions will prevent the threat that he is so concerned about?
If you believe the climate models, then President Obama’s INDC commitment (total of 80% emissions reduction by 2015), then warming would be reduced by 0.011 degrees Centigrade, a number that was provided to me by Chip Knappenberger of CATO using the MAGICC model with an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3.0oC http://www.cato.org/blog/002degc-temperature-rise-averted-vital-number-missing-epas-numbers-fact-sheet. If the climate models are indeed running too hot, then the warming would be reduced by an even smaller number.
2. We have heard a lot of doomsday scenarios about what will happen if we do nothing on climate change. However, there has been less attention to what the results of any actions we take to combat climate might be.
A. Suppose we cut all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Would this avert the supposed catastrophic impacts?
Eliminating all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would reduce the warming by 0.014oC (as per the EPA MAGICC model). This is an amount of warming that is much smaller than the uncertainty in even measuring the global average temperature.
3. Dr. Curry, what happens to academics who step out of line on climate change?
A. Why would experts be afraid to question climate change orthodoxy?
The censure of scientists disagreeing with the IPCC consensus was particularly acute during the period 2005-2010. As revealed by the Climategate emails, there was a cadre of leading climate scientists that were working to sabotage the reviews of skeptical research papers (and presumably proposals for research funding). Further, scientists challenging climate change orthodoxy are subjected to vitriolic treatment in news articles, op-eds and blogs, damaging the public reputation of these scientists. I have heard from numerous scientists who are sympathetic to my efforts in challenging climate change orthodoxy, but are afraid to speak out or even publish skeptical research since they are fearful of losing their job.
Since 2010, things have improved somewhat especially in Europe; I think this has largely been due to reflections following Climategate and the fact that disagreement about climate change is not as starkly divided along the lines of political parties (i.e. the issue is somewhat less politicized). In the U.S., with President Obama’s recent pronouncements about climate denial and climate deniers (as anyone who does not agree with the consensus) has increased the toxicity of the environment (both academic and public) for scientists that question the IPCC consensus on climate change.
There’s a lot more.
Simple Stories
Try to avoid them. This is particularly good advice on climate, and nutrition.
NASA Promoting Junk Science
I don’t know how recent this is, but it’s appalling. At least they don’t say that 97% think it’s catastrophic, or that we have to take action (as many ignorant, or demagogues do). But it cites the long-discredited Cook paper. Shameful.
Climate “Denial”
It is clear from all this that Cook et al. are UNFCCC/IPCC ideologues. There is nothing wrong per se with ideology; it is the ideologues that are the problem – absence of doubt, intolerance of debate, appeal to authority, desire to convince others of the ideological “truth”, and a willingness to punish those that don’t concur. They need to look in the mirror and understand their own motivated reasoning.
Phil Plait is such a disappointment on this topic.
Climate Change And Extreme Weather
People like Seth Borenstein were excited to link to this paper yesterday.
Study: You can pretty much blame human-caused climate change for 3/4 of ultra hot days; http://t.co/LbkJg1Body pic.twitter.com/3pYaD5OXq0
— seth borenstein (@borenbears) April 27, 2015
“This new study helps get the actual probability or odds of human influence,” said University of Arizona climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn’t part of the research. “This is key: If you don’t like hot temperature extremes that we’re getting, you now know how you can reduce the odds of such events by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Lead author Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, and colleague Reto Knutti examined just the hottest of hot days, the hottest one-tenth of one percent. Using 25 different computer models. Fischer and Knutti simulated a world without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and found those hot days happened once every three years.
Then they calculated how many times they happen with the current level of heat-trapping gases and the number increases to four days. So three of the four are human caused, the team said.
This is crap science, because it’s based on crap models, that have been failing.
Interestingly, even Kevin Trenberth agrees with me:
“The paper is interesting and has some results that may be reasonably OK,” he said. “However, the paper is based almost entirely on models with little or no validation or relations to the real world. None of the models do precipitation realistically, and some are quite bad.”
You don’t say. Garbage in, garbage out.