Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
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
Once was plenty.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
...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".'
It better not become a flamewar. Considering flamewars effect climate change it will influence the results.
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)
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.
The fact is the debate would be too boring for anyone to care. If there is a warming trend or a cooling trend (and there's no clear evidence either way, face it...) we're talking about a temperature change so small no one not using this as an excuse to get more funding for something or get (re-)elected cares. That's why it's so insane. Those that want to embrace the whole "Climate change" insanity couldn't care less about the climate (Hello Al....) they just want power over others and money to do as they please.
THIS HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT SCIENCE OR CLIMATE (any more than traffic tickets are about public safety)!! WAKE THE HELL UP!
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.
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
Here is the article from which that was taken: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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
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.
From 57.563 F to 57.923 F is an increase of 0.07%. You can't use 0 F as a zero point for percent increase, as Fahrenheit isn't a zero-based temperature scale. I converted to Kelvin. You could equally use Rankine, but that's unacceptably evil.
It's usually not particularly meaningful to talk about percentage increases in temperature.
To be fair, it's also not particularly meaningful to talk about percentage increases in body weight.
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.
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
"he has a track record of accurately describing temperature in the future."
Not really, his winter forecasts for every year since 2005 have been wrong. His method is that of a fortune teller, ie: make lots of predictions and highlight the ones that are by chance correct or close to correct.
On a side note, climate scientists are not adverse to betting against global cooling.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Climate science no more works that way than statistics predicts the results of individual coin flips.
Trend lines? Sure. But if Bastardi has genuine complaints about the trend lines being inaccurate, the statistical models, the correlation of A and B, he could do exactly what any other scientists does - make a genuine experiment debunking the current set.
But since actual temperatures fall squarely in the middle between the best and worst case scenarios predicted some 30 years ago now, he's decided he wants to run with a PR stunt with the predictable result that during the 7 years he's wrong will never be mentioned in conservative circles, but the two or three years that are below average in Lake CuCooLander will be trumpeted 24/7 as a complete debunking of climate science - and never mentioned again when it regresses to the mean.
Golly Gee Willikers I would love to, but it seems I'm going to be busy hitting my head against the wall for the next decade.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
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.
No, it doesn't say that at all. Statistics of a fair coin flip say that you might get 0, 5, 10, or any integer number in between, heads. It tells you that you're more likely to get 5 (probability 0.24609, if my math is right) than 0 or 10 (probability .00097 each), but it does not rule out 0 or 10.
I make the probability of getting 4, 5, or 6 heads on 10 coin flips to be 0.64648. If I bet you that there will be 4, 5, or 6 heads, and in fact there are some other number, does that mean my theory was wrong? Nope.
Similarly, climate modeling tells us that we are more likely to have a warming trend over the next decade. It does not rule out cooling -- due to, say, a volcanic eruption, or a decrease in insolation, or some other factor unrelated to greenhouse gasses and urban heat islands temporarily overwhelming the warming trend. (Or due to some brilliant new technology that extracts huge amounts of CO2 and methane from the air, or some massive change in human behavior.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
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.
If you claim to be a skeptic then here's an experiment to judge the verasity of Anthony Watts claims. First plot the average temprature from all US weather stations, second plot the average temprature from the 70 US weather stations that surfacestations.org rates as "good" or "best". Compare the two plots, if Watts is correct the two plots will be significantly different.
Luckily NASA has already performed that experiment. Peter Sinclair created a youtube video detailing the experiment and the results (results appear ~5:10 mark). Apparently this contra-evidence annoyed Watts so much that he filed a false DCMA notice against it.
In other words if you don't like frauds, you should not be using Anthony Watts as a source.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.