This reminds me of my piece on climate and the Precautionary Principle.
Category Archives: Mathematics
Expert Judgment And Uncertainty Qualification
An interesting post from Judith Curry on the gross deficiencies of the IPCC approach.
Obama’s Lasting Domestic Legacy
…will be the ObamaCare disaster.
Not really news, though.
Atmospheric Plant Food
Shockingly, when you increase the levels, the plants like it.
Who could have predicted such a thing?
[Update a few minutes later]
Mark Steyn versus the Big Climate enforcers.
The Anti-Trump Vote
Naturally the Trump campaign is bellowing its disapproval of the Cruz-Kasich deal. But there’s nothing unfair about enabling the anti-Trump majority, if it exists, from stopping the nomination of a candidate it believes would be disastrous for the party and dangerous for the nation.
Finally. I hope it’s not too late. Of course, “bellowing” is what the Trump campaign does best.
[Update a few minutes later]
Present
I Regret Voting For Donald Trump https://t.co/j7ukfhAi2U pic.twitter.com/BMoZUAXYpc — Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) April 26, 2016 nt-at-the-destruction/” target=”_blank”>at the destruction
As a result of this profound success, whatever the differences between the two major parties may have been on other issues, these two fundamental bedrock principles underlying the creation and continuation of the post-1945 world order have remained uncontroversial among serious political leaders for the seven decades ever since.
Unfortunately, this has now changed. In both major parties, powerful figures have arisen who are challenging this long-held consensus. Among the Democrats, the chief usurper is the Marxian socialist Bernie Sanders. Among the Republicans, it is the national socialist Donald Trump. Both would gut the Western alliance. Both would wreck the system of global free trade. Both would cause a global depression. Both would unleash the dogs of war. While their rhetoric is quite different, on the central issue of defending or betraying the Pax Americana, the program of both is the same.
It is to be expected that a rabid left-wing socialist like Bernie Sanders would support such a program, and one must be thankful that the remaining Atlanticist forces within the Democratic Party appear to have him and his faction in check – at least for this election year. But what can one say of the Republicans and allegedly “right wing” radical Donald Trump? National Review founder William F. Buckley used to say that conservatives should support the most conservative electable candidate. Hillary Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s deleterious liberal policies for four more years. So she is certainly no conservative. But Donald Trump would destroy the Western alliance and the world economy. On the basis of that comparison, if the two were to face off in November, as incredible as it may seem, William F. Buckley would have no choice but to vote for Clinton. Surely we can do better.
Unfortunately, the problem with Clinton goes far beyond per prospective policies. She would be the most corrupt president since, well…the last time we had a President Clinton. Though Obama’s been no slouch in that regard, either.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Why I regret my vote for Trump.
I Regret Voting For Donald Trump https://t.co/j7ukfhAi2U pic.twitter.com/BMoZUAXYpc
— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) April 26, 2016
“A Dark Future”
In which we may not be able to predict natural variability.
Gee, just like now. This is profoundly ignorant of history. Does he imagine anyone predicted the Medieval Warm Period? Or the Little Ice Age? Has he ever heard of the Dust Bowl?
Silencing Dissent On Science
George Will describes the latest attempts at censorship of those who deign to disagree with our intellectual and moral superiors (just ask them!) on the Left:
“The debate is settled,” says Obama. “Climate change is a fact.” Indeed. The epithet “climate change deniers,” obviously coined to stigmatize skeptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to obscure something obvious: Of course the climate is changing; it never is not changing — neither before nor after the Medieval Warm Period (end of the 9th century to the 13th century) and the Little Ice Age (1640s to 1690s), neither of which was caused by fossil fuels.
Today, debatable questions include: To what extent is human activity contributing to climate change? Are climate change models, many of which have generated projections refuted by events, suddenly reliable enough to predict the trajectory of change? Is change necessarily ominous because today’s climate is necessarily optimum? Are the costs, in money expended and freedom curtailed, of combating climate change less than the cost of adapting to it?
But these questions may not forever be debatable. The initial target of Democratic “scientific” silencers is ExxonMobil, which they hope to demonstrate misled investors and the public about climate change. There is, however, no limiting principle to restrain unprincipled people from punishing research entities, advocacy groups and individuals.
That’s the problem with leftist opponents to limited government; there are never any limiting principles on anything.
Peer Review
It almost always provides a false sense of validity of a scientific paper.
“Denialism”
Does it exist? It’s hard to say:
It’s possible that with a lot of work, some extreme corner of the behavior spectrum could be isolated via specific criteria, which then merits labeling as ‘denialist’. But in truth the characteristics of our ‘proto-denialists’ above are radically different to expectations from the current framing, a framing which may have tainted the term beyond redemption. Nor is this approach a great plan even without that taint, because it tends to mask uncomfortable yet crucial truths, especially those in f) and g). So along with other errors we may end up fooling ourselves that there’s a nice clinical division between skeptics and ‘denialists’. Via naïve assumption of cause from a basic categorization of rhetoric, this is exactly the trap I believe Diethelm and McKee have fallen into. Hoofnagle goes further, dishing out labels of ‘dishonest’ and ‘crank’ yet without proper theoretical grounds; despite his noble motives many of these are bound to stick onto the wrong people. Some dishonesty and crankiness will ride any cultural wave, or backlash to such a wave, or backlash to an evidential cause that is perceived as cultural encroachment. But this does not mean that cranks and liars drive the main action; they do not. Nor can the touted methods reliably distinguish crankiness from cultural influence, or skepticism from either.
I would note (as always) that “denial,” and “denialism,” and “denialist” are not scientific terms. They’re religious ones.
[Update a while later]
Bill Nye epitomizes the Left’s authority complex.
Trump’s Empire State Victory
It’s still going to be very hard for that Democrat to win the Republican nomination.
[Update a few minutes later]
Don’t confuse primary success with general success:
Now, there’s no reason in principle why a candidate who wins “only” 12 or 13 million votes in the primaries (or even just five or six or seven million) could not win a general election. That depends entirely on the candidate and his campaign. But the point here is that even a terrific primary performance offers zero evidence that a candidate actually can win a general election. As all of the head-to-head polling illustrates, it isn’t even a sign that that said candidate would perform better in a general election than other candidates who got fewer votes in the primaries.
This is especially true in Trump’s case. His hard-core supporters fail to comprehend just how deeply unpopular he is with everybody else outside their relatively small group. According to the last eight polls taken on the question, Trump has an unfavorable rating of between 60 and 70 percent among the general population that will vote in the 2016 election. He is not that much more popular than the ebola virus. (Although no virus has ever tried to run for president, so we cannot be sure.)
Trump supporters seem to be quite delusional about this. There is no one who doesn’t have an opinion about him at this point — he has no up side. When someone as well known as him can’t beat someone as unpopular as Hillary Clinton, it would be insane to make him the nominee (particularly when it would be one Democrat versus another).
[Afternoon update]
Classless Crybaby Wants To Be America’s Complainer-in-Chief.
Rick Wilson is a cruel man, but fair.
[Thursday-morning update]
GOP delegates: Trump’s attacks may backfire on him.
You don’t say.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
D. C. McAllister agrees with me; Trump and his supporters don’t understand our system of government.