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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."
Hypothesis followed by observation... admittedly, it cannot be repeated, but it is, at the very least, a step in the right direction. 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. Is it showmanship for him to do it this way? Sure. But at least it is showmanship with a useful point.
For the record, meteorologists are not climatologists. This is little different than engineers imagining themselves as physicists.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Would have to precisely define "objective satellite data" to a specific measuring methodology, technology, and sensitivity.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I'd be more interested to see if sea level rises follow the 67% average acceleration figure, or trend towards the more ambitious 300% that thas been bandied about. Or just stay constant.
So this is a meteorologist who studies short-term phenomena claiming to be better at short-term prediction than people who study long-term phenomena. Wowee, zip de-doo. If a climatologist accepts his bet and loses, what does it prove? That a climatologist isn't a meteorologist, and I think we knew that already.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Another weatherman who thinks what he's doing is climatology. He's a little like a 2D character in Flatland that doesn't understand 3D. I hope someone takes him up on his wager, as long as there's a disinterested 3rd party to judge the result and hold the cash.
I have faith in the civility and objectiveness of slashdotters, even on climate change issues.
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.
That Bastardi!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.html
I like to go where the science is being done, rather than the claims from either side on what I should think based on a dare, er, I mean bet. Not a dare, a bet. That's so much more scientific. ;)
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
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.
It better not become a flamewar. Considering flamewars effect climate change it will influence the results.
Doesn't a wager normally involve an ante?
If Bastardi wins the wager what does he gain, karma points? There will be big wins all around for individuals, businesses and governments.
If Bastardi loses the wager he loses what? It appears if we wait and Bastardi turns out to be wrong we will be behind by one more decade on addressing the issue and a heavy price will be paid by everyone.
And while he has some valuable points as far as the accuracy of climatologists making predictions his analogies seem a bit off.
He claims they are using recent trends but does not define "recent" while the trends I have seen go back several decades or centuries. In geologic time centuries are recent trends but is this what he means? I suspect not because then he questions the use of data in longer trends.
And in another analogy he compares a 0.06% change in your weight form 175.0 lbs to 175.1 lbs over a decade to a 0.6% increase in global temperature from the mean of around 57.563 F to 57.923 F. While the increase in temperature over a decade doesn't look significant his comparison is off by an order of magnitude and that is ignoring the irrational comparison of the complexities of an individuals body weight to that of global temperatures.
Anyhow, it is good to bring up questions but this wager and some of the comments seem rather dubious.
The only thing I've not really been able to figure out from the entire climate discussion is what is meant by "average temperature" in the first place.
The idea of taking some temperature measurements at various geographic locations and then averaging those values doesn't seem to make much physical sense to me, because there is no meaningful method by which to perform an average. Consider using an "area based average." This sounds reasonable: put your measurements in some regular grid, assume the temperature varies continuously between those points, and compute an average. I would argue that's a terrible method, because temperature is not a continuous quantity: if you put two temperature probes any distance apart, there is no meaningful way to estimate the temperature variation between those points. It could be linear between them, it could be nonlinear such that the temperature is higher between the two points, it could be nonlinear such that it is lower between the two points.
I am much more willing to look at other parameters which do have a better "average" information content. Sea level, snow cover (both max and min amounts, as well as time spent at those amounts) because those are inherently continuous phenomena that are not subject to interpolation errors.
Actually, a question and it may actually convince me to accept the concept of "average temperature": do thermal satellites have the capability to do a true area-continuous temperature measurement?
I have other questions as well, for instance, is average temperature really the critical parameter or is it median temperature? Actual max vs actual min? Is it something more related to the square of the deviation from the mean ("signal power")?
I have a hard time believing that an area-average temperature is an adequate parametrization of climate. Or, perhaps what I'm asking is, what climate effects are actually correlated so strongly with the mean temperature (how statistically significant is that correlation)? And how geographically dependent is that correlation?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Whatever you think of it's relevance for the theory of AGW, Bastardi has made a specific prediction and challenged anyone to take him up on it. If those climatologists who are believers in AGW are true scientists they should be able to make a specific prediction that we can come back to in 10 years and either say, "Way to go, your prediction is correct" or "Sorry, back to the drawing board on your theory, your prediction is wrong."
The last major AGW prediction I can recall was that England would not have snow in winter any more. Of course, now that England has had a very snowy winter, those same AGW guys are telling us, "Well, yes, that is what you can expect from Global Warming." I would put a lot more credence into the latter statement if they had told us we could expect a snowier winter in England instead of telling us that England would be getting less and less snow every year.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I like how Bastardi is not grinding any political axes. What he says sounds logical. If you look at the wikipedia entry on him there's mention (but no link) of Bastardi's long-range forecast for this winter, that was released by AccuWeather last October. It has already been shown to be very far off the mark of what has happened the last couple of months. So this guy's track record isn't any better than any other "weather man".
AccuWeather isn't above trying to aggrandize themselves, either. They tried to get the government to close down the National Weather Service and halt the distribution of weather satellite data to the public a few years ago.
Saying that climate science is just a big weather forecast is like saying that newtonian physics is just a lot of quantum mechanics. Doing 5 day forecasts isn't enough to qualify someone to forecast climates. Yeah, it may help, but it's not enough.
You really should be linking to NASA as well. They're the other major body that studies climate change. And it's likely one of the reasons why it's always being targeted for budget cuts by the GOP. A lot of what NASA does is keeping tabs on changes going on our planet from space.
Showmanship is fine. After all, the Randi foundation has used the showmanship of its million dollar prize for a while now to punch holes into all kinds of quackery. But as I read through Bastardi's claims and comments, I was disappointed to see nothing new and some pretty standard failings.
“The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says this is the warmest decade ever — well, that’s like you wake up every morning and weigh 175 pounds, and one morning you wake up and are 175.1.”
No, it's more like weighing 175 lbs in the last decade, and then discovering that your average in the current decade has been 176. And that your weight has been increasing for the last 5 decades.
We started using objective satellite data in 1978.
He must have missed all the commotion about satellite data that revolved around what satellites are measuring, how they're measuring it and how their data fits into all the other data that's been collected. Specifically: a temperature station on the ground that produces a different reading than that of a satellite looking at infrared emission for that geographic area isn't (necessarily) wrong. It is measuring something completely different, and merging the two is hard.
Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, a tiny gas, part of this huge system. You’re trying to tell me that’s going to control the system and influence the energy of the system? When you have things like the sun, which is obviously the greatest contributor to the world’s energy? It almost defies common sense.
I started to lose confidence at this point. It's a standard argument from incredulity: I don't understand this, therefore it can't be true. He also confuses what's causing global warming: it's not only the energy input that controls how much warming occurs, but also how much energy is lost to space. And the problem that everyone's been talking about is that less energy is lost to space than before.
CO2 is still increasing, and the overall temperature has leveled off.
Because CO2 isn't the only thing that controls the Earth's temperature. If he had actually read the research and would understand climate science, he'd know that, and he'd know that this bit of info is widely known. My personal prediction 5 years ago was that we'd be getting back to a regular warming schedule in the next 1-3 years, based on nothing else than knowing that the sun was entering a quiet period then.
That’s not how the atmosphere works — for every step it takes away from the norm, the more likely it is to turn back
I don't know if he was misquoted, but that's not how the atmosphere works. There is nothing in the atmospheric cycle that regulates CO2 movement. Oceans absorb CO2, plants consume it, but that's not the atmosphere. Finally, he is not providing any numbers for his belief that the atmospheric CO2 content is controlled by negative feedback loops. Historic data on CO2 concentrations would actually indicate the opposite - that there can be wild fluctuations.
Fifth, today’s weather exhibits no unique patterns that require a unique explanation. They’re nothing we haven’t seen before
Now we're getting into weather. If he's going to lecture people on climate patterns and predictions, he should stay on topic.
And that’s just Bastardi’s point. It’s disingenuous to say we have conclusive proof of the future of such a torturously complicated system.
Ok, not something he said, but still - another lame argument from incredulity. There's plenty of complex systems out there, and many have been understood - just not by everybody.
Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
Your facts are complete bullshit. The US does not throw out enough food each day to feed the entire world, although enough food is produced worldwide to feed everyone if distribution systems were adequate. The island of floating debris you mention is mostly invisible to the naked eye and consists of small particles of plastic in the upper part of the water column. It's something to be concerned about, no doubt, but your description is hardly accurate. I can't refute your carbon footprint claim any more than you can prove it, but the fact people that are starving and live in filth and poverty may have a smaller carbon footprint doesn't seem to be all that relevant. Should we all live like they do? As for the rest, what's your point? Accusing anyone with money and/or power of being corrupt is the most common excuse for personal failings. If it makes you feel better, great.
"There is not debate" is what the people drinking the coolaid say now to refute anyone who denies global warming. Rarely does anyone point to data. The guy in this article is supported by large corporations who are willing to bet large sums of money on what he predicts. In other words, they put their money where HIS mouth is. I don't see anyone betting on Al Gore other than publishers who can profit from his rhetoric right now. If I could bet real money, I'd raise this guy .1 degree C and say temps will decrease 0.3C in ten years (but that has to be hedged for the rise in air traffic in China).
I'm imagining myself so in love with physics that I could never imagine the possibility that I might want some money some day, or even provide well for a family. I'm imagining myself being suckered into a decade of grad school and postgrads by a professor who is on a decent salary. I imagine him telling tales of professors and the occasional 6 figure making physicist in order to excite the grad students, while glossing over the realities of the number of professorships and 6 figure salaries available compared to the number of grad students/PhDs. I imagine myself perfecting the raised eyebrow along with the expression and voice to make disparaging remarks about working for industry, and especially - (holds nose, dramatic pause;) engineers. I imagine myself buying into the hype for the first few years, and then spending the rest of my life wondering what I was thinking while either continuing to drink the koolaid or making the eventual break for freedom. Am I close?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I was looking at property on lake Huron, and the water levels are down over the last 10 years leading to some undesirable things (nice sandy beach with 200 feet of marsh and then water). Some blame global warming, some blame dredging, and the agent tells me "it will be great when the lake level returns to normal. All the while I'm thinking "It's been receding ever since the glacier melted, what makes you think it's coming back?". We haven't even measured temperature the same way for 40 years.
The problem is simply that they don't -at all- have confidence in their methods. There are several basic problems :
Climate is chaotic. In fact, mathematical chaos theory *is* the original climate theory. Literally. Chaos theory started out as an analysis of long-term weather trends over Britain, and all collected British weather data (quite a lot, given the activities of their fleet, accurate data spanning all continents and seas, several hundred years). There was a tiny little problem : weather data did not obey the law of large numbers, making the basic assumption of statistics invalid. Temperature turned out ... not to have an average. Not to have a standard deviation. Whoops.
That means that, mathematically speaking, AGW could be 100% accurate today, and that still doesn't give you one iota of predictability. Weather, and long term climate could still become totally unresponsive to CO2 overnight. More specifically in a given chaotic system *any* prediction (within certain limits) *will* happen, just not known when.
In a chaotic dataset, there is *no* way to predict the future, no matter the amount and accuracy of the available data, nor can the quality of the system help you (except - if you're God and know *everything*. By that we mean the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe. This is often joked about - if a person can't give the lotto outcomes for the next 100 years, he can't give you the weather -or climate- in 100 years either.
It's a joke similar to the butterfly flapping it's wings in the amazon. You miss one butterfly ...
Second : climate scientists are not total idiots in the math department. They use prediction rules in the form of differential equations, then they simulate them with lots of data. What these equations do is essentially : given the situation at x(t = 0.000001) they allow you to "jump ahead" and determine the situation at x(t = 0.02).
The problems are simple. Either you work with very small jumps in timing, or you work with big jumps in timing. Very small jumps in timing mean relatively small errors, but you accumulate a LOT of them. The error margin grows exponentially, so you can imagine that even with a tiny error, before a few days pass in your prediction, there's a lot of error. Or you work with big jumps in time, but then you can't accurately simulate "the little things" (the effect of smaller variations in geography for example). So you have a big (and unknown) error margin, but, because you don't accumulate so much of them, it is *assumed* you can predict further out (this is not actually true, but we don't have any other method to do this, so we merrily assume this won't blow up in our faces - despite, obviously, this having blown up in quite a few faces already and is well known. Scientists, like real people, are quite tolerant of imperfect methods when there's no alternative)
You know when the error margin on the best climate models exceeds 100% (ie. there is more error than prediction) ? After 5 days. Obviously, knowing this full well, scientists are *very* wary of making predictions 10 years out.
And rightfully so : if you track the IPCC's predictions you will find that the current situation is actually outside of the 95% error margin of *ALL* IPCC climate reports, except the last one. In all 3 cases, we're below the predicted value : it is a *lot* cooler today than scientists predicted 2010 would be in 1990 and 2000 (*lot* as compared to the scientists own specified error margin). For both IPCC reports we're outside the 95% confidence interval (and for the 2010 one, we're not all that far from the edge either, heh, "next year in jerusalem" as they say).
Again, scientists know perfectly well that this is so (there's published papers about this, lots of discussion and consternation about them, big egos, lots of screaming, before everything settled down and everyone basically decided to ignore them after a few scientists were fired). So, surprise, surpris
Since when is Bastardi oil company backed? He makes a living giving forecasts. People pay him for forecasts because other organisations (like the UK Met Office) have their heads so far up Global Warming's arse, their medium and long term predictions are no better than chance. If his forecasts were crap, he'd be out of a job and his company would have folded. These other tax-payer funded organisations have no such worries, which is why they can afford to spend their time spreading propaganda, rather than actually coming up with good forecasting models.
Take a look at http://theclimatebet.com/ to see an earlier example. A similarly (un)qualified guy offered to bet that temperatures would be unchanged over ten years. He tried to get Al Gore to bet, of course without success. So he started this website to track who would have won. At first it looked good for him and he updated regularly, crowing about his success. But then things changed and started warming up. Now the website is abandoned. He didn't have the guts to document his failure. I imagine much the same will result from this new bet.
The problem is simply that they don't -at all- have confidence in their methods. There are several basic problems :
Climate is chaotic. In fact, mathematical chaos theory *is* the original climate theory. Literally. Chaos theory started out as an analysis of long-term weather trends over Britain
Long term weather isn't climate, Mr. Bastardi.
Fandroids hate facts.
All the predictions made so far by the AGW community have so far been totally wrong
There is no uncontrollable warming.
If early predictions are wrong, the whole model is wrong, it's not going to magically get better in later years.
Ehrlich said back in the 70's that "England will not exist in the year 2000". Obviously he was wrong. But his web page had this little gem:
So Ehrlich says that "famines of unbelievable proportions" will occur, "hundreds of millions of people starving to death" "England will not exist in the year 2000". Then Ehrlich has the audacity to say Simon is spreading inaccurate information. I don't give a damn how smart you believe you are or how many "Genius Awards" are given to you. If you're wrong you're wrong. Ehrlich is so stubborn that if you read his page you would have thought that _he_ won the bet. He (or whoever wrote the page) makes no attempt to defend the idiotic (and now demonstrably false) statements Ehrlich made, but just goes into nuance of "how things could have been worse but for...". They were not, and that was Simon’s whole point, people react to the world they live in, we are not a growth in a petri dish. Ehrlich makes all these excuses as to "why he was wrong" without saying he was wrong, because he still believes that he was right. He still believes he was right and only because those damn snooping kids did England continue to exist past 1999.
Just read Ehrlich’s page, he does more disservice to himself than anyone else could ever do. The AGW people are cut from the same mold as Ehrlich. AGW cannot be wrong as a matter of pride. It has nothing to do with science, if it did there would be a way to falsify the theory. As it stands now, you cannot. Anything that points to AGW being wrong (e.g.: No uncontrollable warming) is always countered with “OH! Didn’t you know? That’s because of global warming!” It sounds more and more like Ehrlich.
But what speaks to the heart of this issue is that the AGW supporters don’t hope beyond hope that the skeptics are right. They hope the skeptics are wrong because it is a matter of pride.
That means that, mathematically speaking, AGW could be 100% accurate today, and that still doesn't give you one iota of predictability. Weather, and long term climate could still become totally unresponsive to CO2 overnight. More specifically in a given chaotic system *any* prediction (within certain limits) *will* happen, just not known when. In a chaotic dataset, there is *no* way to predict the future, no matter the amount and accuracy of the available data, nor can the quality of the system help you (except - if you're God and know *everything*. By that we mean the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe. This is often joked about - if a person can't give the lotto outcomes for the next 100 years, he can't give you the weather -or climate- in 100 years either.
A subtle but important distinction, but chaotic systems are ones in which if you did know the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe you could predict the system's behavior, the basic problem is that we can't and small deviations in any of the initial conditions will produce drastically different outcomes. Chaotic systems are deterministic by definition but hypersensitive to their initial conditions. From wiki:
This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.
What this means is that while accurate long-term predictions are impossible, it is possible to analyze trends to some degree of accuracy. You can perform sensitivity analyses looking at how alterations in some parameters ultimately influence the trajectory of the entire system. I think this is a pretty sensible way of going about it and the interpretations presented under this light are a great deal more accurate and enlightening than global temperature projections. The most reliable thing we can say so far is that all long-term models show that increasing CO2 will likely cause increasing mean temperature in the long run and more extreme weather in the short term.