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.
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.
Even before we ask that question: if the earth gets both hotter and cooler, does it matter?
Who cares if we have an impact if it doesn't matter?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...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".
They are also actually judged by results instead of claiming any result obtained verified what they were claiming.
Meteorologists. Weather predictors. The guys who have been the butt of accuracy jokes for hundreds of years. Are judged by results. That, that right there? That is an interesting position to take.
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".'
The day climatologists perfect the science is the day meteorologists will be able to give forecasts with extraordinary accuracy. Meteorologists ride on the coattails of climatologists success.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
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.
The day climatologists perfect the science is the day meteorologists will be able to give forecasts with extraordinary accuracy. Meteorologists ride on the coattails of climatologists success.
It's rather the other way around. Meteorology models were around before climatology models were. And accurate climatology models won't help meteorology predictions at all. Climatology knowledge is at the wrong time scale to help with weather predictions. It's like claiming that you'll be able to drive precisely and without error because you know exactly how far it is to your destination.
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.
They don't take an average absolute temperature, but an average temperature anomaly, which makes a lot more sense. At each station, they measure the temperature difference between the current temperature, and a 30-year base period. Research has shown there's a good correlation between anomalies of different measuring stations, even if separated by hundreds of miles, even though the absolute temperatures between those same stations could differ by ten degrees or more.
See here for more info:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1987/Hansen_Lebedeff.html
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
"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.
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