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Bastardi's Wager
DesScorp writes "AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi has a challenge for climate scientists. He wants one or more of their rank to accept a bet about temperature trends in the coming decade. Bastardi is making specific predictions. 'The scientific approach is: you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,' he says. 'That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.' Bastardi's challenge to his critics — who are legion — is to make their own predictions. And then wait. Climate science, he adds, 'is just a big weather forecast.' Bastardi's challenge is reminiscent of the famous Simon-Ehrlich Wager, where the two men made specific predictions about resource scarcity in the '80s."
Would have to precisely define "objective satellite data" to a specific measuring methodology, technology, and sensitivity.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
And what is that useful point? To inject more politics and bullshit into the scientific process? I'm sorry, but despite what these oil-company backed think tanks say, there is no global scientific conspiracy to force you back into the dark ages and to live like vegan hippies.
Or a physicist building a bridge.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The Earth gets hotter, the Earth gets cooler.
But do WE have an impact on this variation. That is the question.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
For the record, telling engineers that they have no business making bets with their physicist "betters" is likely to get you laughed at by both engineers and physicists.
So....why do the climate scientists keep citing specific decades if 10 years isn't long enough for it to be climate? Why are the 2000's cited as the hottest decade and called evidence for global warming if it's too short a time period to be used for that? You can't have your cake and eat it too. The use of decades as evidence of climate has been pretty consistent for most climate related papers.
meteorologists are not climatologists.
That is correct. Meteorologists are not foolish enough to pretend they understand climate well enough to predict what the climate will do for the whole earth over an extended period of time.
They are also actually judged by results instead of claiming any result obtained verified what they were claiming.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...that he would offer this wager after the warmest year on record. A more reasonable wager would be on whether or not 2020 will be above the historical average for the past century. Smart money says "yes".
It's more like: climate is a probability distribution and weather is the specific outcome measured. If I have a fair coin, I can say that 50% of the time it will come up heads and 50% it will come up tails. I cannot say what the result of any particular flip can be, however. This is why it doesn't make sense to claim, "We can't even predict the weather 10 days from now, so how can we predict the climate 10 years from now?" One thing is a specific measurement (hard to predict) and the other thing is a probability distribution (easy to predict).
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
"All too often people let their emotions / politics / media-lust get in the way of doing actual work towards understanding the planet we live on.
And THAT, my friends, are the truest words I've ever heard uttered regarding this debate.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
There is no real debate. The people who actually know the science are largely in agreement about the conclusions. The "debate" being spoke of is faux debate stirred up by people from think tanks funded by oil companies. It's about as meaningful as fundy wackos going on about how there is large debate over the legitimacy over the theory of evolution.
IANA climate scientist, but I suspect that three things will happen:
1. As this is a complicated subject, nobody can predict exactly what will be happening in 2010. Some will be right.
2. Some will be wrong.
3. Supporters will claim victory for the first group.
4. deniers will claim victory due to the second group.
5. Ten years will have passed, and we will still be arguing about whether we should do something about the issue.
If there's no debate, then the global warming high priests will be all too happy to take up his wager.
Unless their theories don't make predictions that specific. It's perfectly possible to have a theory which is undisputed but whose predictions are long-range and apply to the big picture. Tell me, does the theory of evolution by natural selection allow you to predict how long it will take for speciation to occur again within Homo sapiens?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
There is no debate, because the chicken littles AGWers are shills for the enviromental wacko socialists. The lack of debate is magnified by pointy heads in academia who think they are smarter than everyone else. It is about as meaningful as the exact number of crickets are chirping tonight.
Yep. You're right. A group of fringe wackos whom nobody takes seriously somehow managed to control an entire branch of science. It's just like how the atheist lobby completely controls biology, right? How do they manage to do that? Who knows, but they must have a way, because a conspiracy theory is the only way to explain the lack of debate!
How you got modded "insightful" for a post that absolutely no insight at all is beyond me.
Apparently quite a bit about how the real world works is beyond you.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
No legitimate scientist believes in global warming as a condition caused by human activity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
He's making a 10-year prediction. I think that'd be more "climate" than "weather".
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Not so much. Incomplete information can be as destructive as bad information. Think about it...
From a programmer's standpoint, having a boatload of incomplete information from a client is a coin toss. Sure, you can get started on the project, and hey, maybe you can adapt your design to meet whatever pops up when the client finally gets around to giving you the missing information. Or you could waste time and good money going in the wrong direction for several months, with the low morale (among your team) when you realize you need to completely redesign the project.
A major problem lays with the definition of science. People speak of a "unanimous consensus" among Climate Scientists, which is nice, in much the same way as we might have a "unanimous consensus" among Computer Scientists or Chemists or Physicists. What more, science is not decided by committee or consensus (such things are more related to theology), but by reproduction of results by scientists performing the same experiment independently of one another. You have a hypothesis (a conjecture), observation and experimentation, followed by a theory (after many scientists have performed the experiment and have verified the results, and a fair amount of time has passed). The emphasis is on reproduction of results, by experimental validation. Making a prediction as per the hypothesis, and seeing if it comes true.
To repeat, reproduction, not consensus, is what matters. We do not teach children that the theory of gravity was verified by a bunch of scientists a long time ago, and that was that! Instead, we pull out the monkey and the dart gun (popular physics experiment), have them voice their predictions, then voice the prediction according to the theory of gravity, and perform the experiment. Students are free to play with the toys and to try to prove or disprove the theory of gravity. It's the prediction, then the proof, that solidifies the superiority of the scientific method over the navel gazing that passes for science (as reported by the media) today.
Science is not some holy priesthood where only the properly initiated can read and understand an experiment's results. Sure, there is some unique knowledge to the branch of climate science, as there is to physics, biology, computer science, etc. And yes, there may be a brief period of learning vocabulary, methods, and algorithms unique to that branch. However, to imagine that anyone who does not possess the title of "Climate Scientist" may not offer a dissenting opinion is utter madness.
Would I shun a mathematician who points to the break down of one of the algorithms in my program, just because he isn't as learned in programming languages as myself?
What more, the results these scientists offer is one of statistics, not experimental validation. This makes for weak evidence, which is not helped by their inability to properly store (and not tamper with), if rumors prove true, the raw data. Would you allow the election of a politician, if the method for counting had been altered? Should we take the people who tallied the votes at their word, given that they set fire to the original ballots, and we have no way to verify their results?
If you happen to (subconsciously, or even consciously) favor the politician (whom the possibly tainted vote) shows in the lead over the other politician, you might say that even if the vote had been altered, it could not possibly be altered by such a margin as to swing the election. Or if you didn't favor the leading politician, you might disagree, and affirm that it may matter.
In such areas of such areas of science where correlation wishes to give rise to causation, it of the utmost importance to avoid any appearance of tainted results.
On another note, why are some people resistant to these results? Why do they fight so fiercely? Well, some it is religion, some it is disbelief that human beings are capable of such worldwide changes, some it is the taint of the results making them hard to swallow and for others you are asking t
I am John Hurt.
No, the Theory of Evolution does not do that. But, it does say that if one takes two isolated communities and puts each under different and contradicting pressures, the communities will select for different traits and THAT can be tested.
Yes, and climate change theory says that if you add more greenhouse gases to a system then the temperature of the system will rise on average over time, and THAT can be tested. It just doesn't say by how much, in a decade.
People claim that climate change is settled science, and it seems to me that settled science should be able to predict a temperature change over a decade, especially when there is allegedly so much data.
Yes. The science that says AGW is occurring is settled. That doesn't mean we have a precise model for how fast it will occur. Having a big-picture question settled and having a precise model are two very different things. It is no way implied by something being "settled science" that it should be able to make a specific type of prediction with a specified amount of data.
Seriously, why can't they just publish a table that says if a decade from now the CO2 level is x, then the increase in temperature should have changed by y?
Because there are literally thousands of confounding factors, and that's just counting ones that are identified. They probably could publish a table saying that if a decade from now the CO2 level is x and nothing else changes, the increase in temperature will be y, but then things will change, like the number of sunspots or the number of farting cows (methane is also a greenhouse gas) or the amount of heat people generate heating their homes or the acreage of plant biomass or goodness knows what else, and their prediction won't apply anymore, but everyone will make hay with how it was wrong and fail to appreciate the unmet assumption.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
All I've seen of late is rhetoric on both sides.
This is also rhetoric - it's a very old trick to silence your critics.
1. Challenge your opponents to make predictions on a 10 year timescale.
2a. If they accept, for the next 10 years you say "You can't criticise me yet, wait til the 10 years are up!"
2b. If they don't accept, for the next 10 years you say "Clearly you don't really know what you're talking about or you'd have been happy to accept my 10 year challenge."
And that gives you 10 years where you can bat away any criticism, without needing to produce any evidence, and take the moral high ground while you're at it.
3. After 10 years, make a very slightly revised challenge (for the following 10 years). "Ah, yes but if we include the new Blenkinsop adjustment then yes it would have warmed slightly in the previous 10 years, but that minor fluctuation is nothing to the cooling that will take place in the following 10 years..."
4. Repeat ad infinitum.
And hey presto, you can say whatever you like for as long as you like.