Category Archives: Mathematics

Business, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Google Chrome

31 Comments

Go home. You’re drunk.

Messed Up Chrome

This is not atypical. After a while, every page starts to refuse to load, or becomes unreadable, and you can paint weird things on it by just waving the cursor over various areas. It’s version 35.0.1916.114 stable, running in Fedora 20.

In frustration, I uninstalled and tried running the current beta. It had its own problems, with continual tab crashes and freezing the machine.

I switched a while ago from Firefox, for various reasons. Opera starts chewing up half my CPU after being up a for an hour or so. It just seems like every browser sucks.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Climate Debate

24 Comments

Over at First Things, John Murdock has some thoughts (including a discussion of me, Mark and the Mann suit), but there is also a howler:

Big decisions, whether in the life of a person or a nation often boil down to trust. America has been hemming and hawing for a while now, trying to decide if the 97 percent or so of climate scientists who say we have a big manmade problem are looking out for our best interest or are self-serving quacks.

Sorry, but this number has been debunked multiple times. It is simply false that 97% of scientists say that we have a “big manmade problem.” You can only get to such a ridiculous number by watering down what the “consensus” is about. Most scientists (including me) believe that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Period. Once you get beyond that, to whether or not we are causing a significant change in the climate with emissions, let alone whether or not the results will be catastrophic, and need to be addressed with immediate public policy, the “consensus” falls completely apart. Anyone who believes in that nonsensus needs to go read this.

Business, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Climate, And Time Scales

How long is long?

The science of climate change on decadal to century timescales most definitely is not settled, in spite of the IPCC’s highly confident proclamations. There are so many interesting and unsolved issues in climate dynamics. At this point, climate science seems relatively irrelevant for energy policies – the goals of carbon mitigation are in place, and whether anything meaningful can be achieved in the near term is doubtful. However, climate scientists are (in the words of Pointman) in a hurry towards some finishing line only they could see, and acted accordingly. I suspect that the IPCC becoming less and less relevant to the UNFCCC agenda.

I’m hoping that at some point soon, climate scientists will get fed up with trying to play politics with their science and get back to researching and debating these fundamentally interesting and unsolved issues in climate science, rather than attacking their colleagues for suggesting that there are other ways of thinking about climate change.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Climate Scientists

3 Comments

Are they being forced to toe the line? Sure looks like it:

I have heard that a number of leading scientists are pretty disgusted with the way Bengtsson has been treated and see the larger issues of concern about the social psychology of our field. People are talking about writing blog posts for professional societies, trying to get signatures on a statement, etc. I hope that these individuals follow through, and that the ‘climate’ for climate research can improve.

This is a very welcome change from the 2009 reactions to Climategate, which reflected most silence, but solidarity with the climate scientists whose emails were made public.

With regards to Pielke Jr’s statement: “anyone who wishes to participate in the public debate on climate change should do so knowing how the politics are played today — dirty, nasty, destructive.” I agree with this statement. As someone participating in the in public debate on climate change, I certainly expect barbs from the media and advocacy groups. What concerns me greatly is other scientists behaving in a dirty, nasty and destructive way, in other words, playing dirty politics with their science.

Can climate scientists please stop the intimidation, bullying, shunning and character assassination of other scientists who they find ‘not helpful’ to their cause? Can we please return to logical refutation of arguments that you disagree with, spiced with a healthy acknowledgement of uncertainties and what we simply don’t know and can’t predict?

Probably not. Not until they suffer some truly adverse consequences for it.