Category Archives: Science And Society

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Model Land

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Judith Curry, on a new paper concerning how to escape from it:

Naïvely, we might hope that by making incremental improvements to the “realism” of a model (more accurate representations, greater details of processes, finer spatial or temporal resolution, etc.) we would also see incremental improvement in the outputs. Regarding the realism of short-term trajectories, this may well be true. It is not expected to be true in terms of probability forecasts. The nonlinear compound effects of any given small tweak to the model structure are so great that calibration becomes a very computationally-intensive task and the marginal performance benefits of additional subroutines or processes may be zero or even negative. In plainer terms, adding detail to the model can make it less accurate, less useful. [Emphasis added]

Computer models can be useful in some circumstances, but they are not science.

Administrative, Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

An Argument Too Far

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I don’t necessarily agree that the 737-MAX fiasco was a result of climate hysteria. Yes, the new design reduced emissions, but it did that by reducing fuel consumption, which is intrinsically a desirable goal for airlines. I’m sure that Boeing wanted to claim that it was lower emissions, for PR purposes, but fuel efficiency has always been a driver of new-aircraft design.

BTW, got home from DC yesterday morning. I had quite a week at IAC, but posting may return to the (subdued) normal this week.

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

California’s Planned Blackouts

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Jim Meigs explains.

I just read that they’re cutting power to the Berkeley campus, which could be a disaster for researchers who need to keep things in the fridge, if they don’t have backup generators.

And you know what isn’t the problem? Climate change. Or at least not anthropogenic climate change. Drought is the natural state of affairs for the place. The 20th century was unusually wet, and a lot of policy decisions were made on the assumption that this was a normal state of affairs.

We’re on So Cal Edison, not PG&E, but we’ve heard that SCE might be planning the same thing. Unclear if we’ll be affected if they do.

[Update Saturday morning]

Californians learn that solar panels don’t work during power blackouts. More policy idiocy, and they’re compounding it by requiring every new home to have them. I can’t believe the state I’ve lived in for four decades, with such an innovative history, has become so effing stupid.

[Bumped]