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The science is settled…..we don’t know, and we are sure of that.
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If you have two different computer models, it is obvious that at least one of them must be wrong. And if the two of them give you the same result, then the two of them are wrong.
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“This is a serious scientific problem…”
…because if we don’t come up with a plausible excuse pretty soon, they’re going to start cutting our grants.
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But wait, I thought the science was settled???
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All this strange stuff about “facts” and “logic” has zero connection with science. Science is solely about maximizing share value.
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A great man once said, Nuts.
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The Chicken Littles are coming home to roost!
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There is not one Feynman among them.
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I hope you were as amused as I was. Well OK. It is a bit esoteric. So esoterically amused.
Comments
7 responses to “Amusing Commentary”
Some years ago, I was privvy to a showing of some Phil Donahue video on the effects of drugs/and/or/alcohol on the brain.
At a certain point, the moderator introduced a statistic that was observed “…fifty-two percent of the time…”
After the conclusion of the presenation, the question was asked, what did we think about the presentation? I said, comparative bullshit, since any statistic that reports an occurance 52 percent of the time is little more than describing a coin-flip. And policies based upon coin flips aren’t policies at all. Just bets, that might be right or wrong at the time. If there’s no predictive value, there’s no statistical value.
The room was aghast!
But, 52 percent! That’s a majority of times!
(Loved your line, “If you have two different computer models, it is obvious that at least one of them must be wrong. And if the two of them give you the same result, then the two of them are wrong.”)
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Nothing esoteric about it. I was just plain laughing…
There is quite a bit of truth to the line about two computer models.
If two *different* models give the same results, you’d better have a darn good explanation for why that is. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive; you’d think that two models giving the same results would increase confidence in the results, but that just ain’t so.
In reality, you would expect two models (given the same input data) to give at least somewhat different results. So you have to ask why two models that use completely different processes gave the same output–was it because the input was skewed, or was it possibly because both models were incorrectly biased toward one result?
Neil,
That was my favorite of the lot.
In my checkered career I’ve worked with the Navier Stokes equation. It governs the atmosphere. We can’t solve it. (In 3D, flows go to shorter and shorter scales, making every resolution inadequate.) So climate scientists substitute an equation that they can solve and solve that. That’s not science, and it doesn’t work.
So there’s no theory.
I’ve also worked in signal processing. You can’t distinguish a trend from a cycle with data short compared to the cycles. The eigenvalues of the distinguishing matrix explode, making every measurement useless, and not just a little bit useless.
So there’s no data.
Since there’s no data and no theory, the climate scientists don’t know what they claim to know.
That’s just from two random contacts with my career.
How many thousand other mistakes are there.
rhhardin-
How about this one? I happen to work with an Ada-like simulation language, and the U. of East Anglia’s models turned out to be written in Ada (when they got leaked to the public–and whoever heard of a scientific experiment that had to be leaked before it could be replicated?).
Their input data violates every basic principle of predictive modeling. Just for one example, they cherry-picked the historical data in order to make their preferred model give the prediction they desired. There is also no indication that they ever back-tested their model (compared the model output to a known data series, using historical data as the input).
It’s really not possible to take at least that group seriously anymore. Since none of the climate models have been willingly released for public inspection, I have to suspect that they are all more or less the same thing.
rhhardin, Neil,
I knew it was bad. I had no idea it was that bad. And I knew it was awful.
BTW I describe a recent run in with Navier-Stokes (Reynolds number actually) here:
http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2013/06/diy-hot-air-iron