I'll just note that the authors don't have 60 years of satellite altimetry and GPS data. Also, googling around I see that Tuvalu does experience land subsidence. It is claimed that this is only 10% of the total observed, but subsidence often is not constant over time.
Glancing at a graph of Tuvalu's sea level rise, I see that sea level has been basically no net gain since a peak of the early 80s. So this phenomena can easily be explained by 1950-1980 subsidence that mostly stopped by 1980. No satellite altimetry or GPS data for that period! This is the peril of making claims based on incomplete data.
It's also worth noting that none of the other islands except one graphed in the above link show this alleged effect (though Penrhyn does show some effect which might be consistent with the claimed sea level model of Becker). That is also consistent with a local subsidence effect.
But let's pass that over and go back to the original assertion that you made. Namely, that the sea level rise at Tuvalu is an AGW disaster (as I asked for). The rise happened from 1950-1980 with no net gain since. Further, carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing for the most part since the Industrial Age started. I just don't see the linkage.
Instead, what I see is a cherry picked sea level rise that has nothing to do with AGW, even if you accept Becker's work at face value.
Leveling the playing field is by definition not playing favorites.
Well, we see the definition doesn't match the reality. From now on, I suggest "interfere" in place of "level the playing field" to more accurately represent what you are proposing.
The rest of your writings, while technically correct as separate statements, all depend on the above statement of yours being correct, which it isn't.
I wouldn't call an upward spike an "epidemic". Rather I'd use language like "surge" and "retreat", or maybe "surge" and "stall" would be better (since a disease which isn't infecting new cases declines either through victims developing resistance or the deaths of the victims).
It would have happened anyway. The EU real estate problem was at least as leveraged as its US equivalent. The collapse just started in the US. Ask yourself why Australia got off light when the US and EU got into trouble.
Several mm difference per year for 60 years? I don't buy it. I'd look for alternate explanations like Tuvalu sinking (say in the areas where the measurements were taken) or the measurements were simply incorrectly taken for decades. The problem here is that the explanation now needs to be backed by evidence, not just the original measurement.
This incentive does not align with the stated goals of the marketplace (to discover the market value of something and trade goods at that value.)
Sure it does. I mentioned faster arbitrage and greater liquidity a few posts back.
You also misunderstand the point I made, thinking it somehow relates to fraud. Theoretically, the market is set up (and the SEC ensures it does) so that using publicly available information in ways to predict the financial health of companies is rewarded. However, HFT introduces a deadweight loss on the system, reducing the incentives for the person/company to seek out opportunities in the stock market.
I don't buy your opinion. What is the mechanism?
The total reward for shorting Enron remains the same- the HFTs made money- therefore it must have come at the expense of the other party to make money: the one who shorted Enron.
The third party is the group of people who react to news. With HFT, they would receive a smaller cut (because the HFT players move first). The fourth party are the market makers and day traders. They receive a smaller cut because there's someone a bit faster than they are.
There's no loss to the shorters who trade on relatively long frames and don't use automated stop loss orders or market orders (both which are HFT-scale trades!) to cover their positions.
It's troubling that we as a society are not willing to invest in our citizens.
It has to have a positive return to be an investment. For example, how do we benefit from a slightly educated person with a bunch of debt and no job experience?
There's always something to learn, and we should strive to make learning the cheapest possible source of entertainment, to encourage as many people as possible to learn as much as possible. That's what makes a society great.
My view is that what makes a society great is infrastructure. It isn't just a group of people, but a group of people with powerful tools that enable them to do a lot of stuff. Traditional stuff like electric grids or transportation networks are infrastructure that enable people to do vast amounts of work or move people and stuff to other places really fast. In that sense, education and training are particularly potent forms of infrastructure since they enable people to do and be things that they couldn't be before.
But infrastructure, even something like education isn't always a net positive benefit. For example, if you get a degree from a college that practices indoctrination instead of education and you borrowed a lot of money to do so, then how does that help you or society? You just borrowed a lot of money that is going to be hard to pay back for an "education" that neither prepares you for the world or helps you think. You probably got some things, such as "polish" (improved social skills), but you also picked a lot of problems.
This is one way that a normally valuable good, education can be turned into something that harms us all.
It's deeply troubling that the response to "tuitions are too high" is "not everyone needs to go to college" these days.
What's troubling? I agree that the statement is true, You agree that it's true. What's going on is that the US government is massively subsidizing education not only resulting in large increases of the cost of tuition, but also putting a lot of people in college who shouldn't be going. They got enabled and all they did was collect a bunch of the worst debt you can have in US society.
This means whoever can get information about changes in bids and in response to that modify their own bids with the lowest latency has an advantage. I cannot see how that can be solved without introducing rounds.
It's already solved in the current market by letting the above just happen. In other words, doing nothing about it works just fine.
Who cares if they worked hard? Life isn't first grade and you don't get an "A" for effort.
Same goes for the whiny babes who want this changed.
Perverse incentives are bad. HFT adds no value.
What "perverse incentive"? Just because some are doing the Red Queen thing doesn't mean that it's the only possible game in the stock market. Trading faster is just another advantage and it is logical to take that to the extreme, such as is done with HFT. Nothing perverse about it.
Therefore things that incentivize removal of latency (short-term goals) at the expense of say, detecting and shorting the next Enron or pumping dollars into a promising startup or trading your less risk-loving dollars for a VC's so he can invest in the next startup actively hurt society.
What would do that? Slashdot has been talking about HFT for a number of years now. I don't recall anyone speaking of a HFT gimmick that would make this sort of stock fraud any easier. The problem is simply that HFT is so far removed from human-scale trading, that there is almost no interaction.
Most ills of the stock market have nothing to do with trade speed (other than they need to get the victim to trade quickly enough, that second thoughts don't get in the way or the scheme doesn't fall apart before the victim invests). I see a lot of people who think that getting rid of HFT somehow fixes these problems, at least partially. It just doesn't work that way.
HFT arbitrage largely exists because of the ability to make bids/offers with no intention of completing the transaction.
That is not arbitrage for two reasons. First, because it's not risk free. No intention of making a trade is not the same as not making a trade. There is the possibility of making a trade at an adverse price. Another HFT trader can attempt to snipe the order while it's still out there.
Second, there isn't an actual trade intended (arbitrage is risk free trading). This is an attempt to distort pricing data to fool computer trading (mostly at slower time scales).
What you propose favors those with the lowest latencies
How? Lower latency is an inherent trade advantage just like knowledge is. Reality favors those with lower latency. "Leveling the playing field" is inherently playing favorites. The playing field isn't level and the traders which are getting an advantage off of that, didn't do anything to deserve an advantage. As I see it, breaking the market to give someone an advantage just doesn't make sense.
The more participants the better the trade, otherwise the market devolves into an exchange between powerhouses that can manipulate the market derived value of the goods.
Yet two more reasons not to break the market. HFT is in addition to other traders so it is an increase in the number of traders (and of course, trades). Similarly, market manipulation is a lot chancier in a realm where someone can respond to your manipulation attempt (and profit thereby) in microseconds rather than much longer periods of time.
Take your 10ns proposal and subtract the communication latency to find out how much time is left for computations. Turns out that the communication latency alone is going to be 3-8 orders of magnitude higher.
No reason traders can't be on the same chip as a piece of the market.
Assuming 500msec per round with the above numbers the time left for computation would vary between 200msec and 500msec. That's 150% more time for the best case than the worst case, meaning traders with worst case latency must acquire hardware which is 150% faster to remain competitive. Increase the round duration to 2sec and the numbers now become 1700msec and 2000msec, only 18% difference.
And at 10 nanoseconds, that would be roughly a factor of 3,000 difference which more accurately reflects the actual difference in computational speed between the different traders.
Is it to further corrupt a country that is hanging by a thread?
I'd have to say this part is probably not correct. Corruption tends to lead to things like lax security and other cases of not doing the job. While this attack probably doesn't have much effect, I'd rather these guys be trying out the security rather than someone with more sinister motives. And maybe that embarrassment will get someone to do their job.
Right, but not without destroying millions of dollars in value, and sometimes much more than even that.
As the other poster noted, there's no indication any value was destroyed. One can't say the same of SEC meddling. Let me put it this way. If you need the SEC to protect you from little things like this, then you shouldn't be in the stock market.
All these stories about traders needing ultralow latencies is a symptom of a fundamentally broken system.
So what's broken? Before we start fixing things, shouldn't we have a problem first?
The system should be modified to be round based rather than real-time.
Real-time looks better to me.
10 seconds per round is long enough
That's a bit too long for a round. How about 10 nanoseconds instead? I might be a bit facetious here, but I see no reason to help out slower traders. The market exists to trade things, not to play favorites. Those low latency traders have to work hard to gain their modest market advantage. And that is as it should be.
In addition to the usual market benefits (such as lightning fast arbitrage and hedging, greater liquidity, etc), we also have a great arms race going on. This whole story is about a concrete spin off of HFT -- better microwave communication.
So how does an area experience sea level rises higher than actual sea level rises? By sinking. Tell me how much responsibility we creators of AGW should have for land that will vanish anyway (and in the process experience increased vulnerability to cyclones)?
Let's just hope the two don't happen at the same time
Why not? That's great timing. I think a big part of the problem is the ridiculous pessimism about our ability to adapt. We aren't just burning oil now. We're doing useful things with that. I think it's rather delusion to claim that slightly cheaper chemicals (or the modest effects of near future AGW) in 2050 or 2100 justifies huge distortions of our economy now.
Which conflict of interest is greater; a climatologist who is going to be studying climate whether AGW is occurring or not, or some of the largest companies in the world who stand to lose a considerable amount if oil use plummets or oil is priced to reflect the actual damage it's doing.
The climatologist of course since they can't make money any other way. The oil company probably will see profits go up, especially if they took the effort to diversify into the renewables market (like several have).
"Minimum advantage" still might justify the effort. As propaganda, it has value. Engineeringwise it's a mixed bag. Yes, the vehicle is likely a deathtrap, but so were a lot of early tanks. Being able to shoot without exposing yourself is an interesting development. I could see value in that by itself, say for setting up remotely operated sniper posts or machine gun nests.
If you want more precise models, you just take more significant digits off the calculator or computer program. They can still be just as wrong as they've been before, but you got more number to play with.
If you want more accurate models, well you need more data against which to test that model. That requires time traveling into the future at the usual rate in order to collect that data.
Now this might just be a translation error (the original article was in German apparently), but I think the actual details of the story back me up. We read of more computing power, "better" models (probably meaning finer mesh sizes). We don't read of more data.
The last part of the article is interesting.
The IPCC's predictions concerning precipitation, on the other hand, may be more conservative than in the previous assessment. Computer models certainly show a clear trend: In places where it already rains a great deal, it will rain even more; and where it is currently dry, it will grow even drier. That's the theory, at least. The only problem is that, so far, these forecasts have not matched reality.
According to the models, subtropical regions, in particular, are expected to grow drier, with new arid zones appearing in the southern United States, South Africa and Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain. Real measurement data from the last 60 years, though, show no such trend toward aridity. Those regions do experience frequent dry periods, but not more often than they have in the past. One possible explanation is that the slight global warming that has occurred so far is not yet enough to cause observable changes in precipitation.
Model not matching reality to the degree needed is traditionally a sign of an inaccurate model. It may be that the models get better as time goes on. But why should one expect divergence in the short term and accuracy in the long term?
The problem here is that none of these predictions are particularly new.
They're also not backed by a lot of data. Satellite measurements are not just "refined", but actually measure for the first time the quantity of average mean global temperature (though not quite at the surface). Past about a century and a half of human weather station measurements, your proxy data becomes even more uncertain.
As to predictions, the long term predictions of these "better" models can't be gauged until we run out the clock a lot. But "medium term" predictions have been rather poor.
None of this was invented yesterday, and yet, because you have this emotional desire to reject the evidence, you shoot the messenger, declaring climatologists frauds or saying "We need more time."
So you aren't at all interested in massive conflicts of interest among the messengers and the people who fund them?
We're seeing major melt in the Arctic now, just as predicted, so how much fucking time do you want?
We're also seeing albedo changes from wildfires (soot is particularly effective for short term changes of albedo of snow). Something we probably would have seen anyway.
I think two decades would work. If those "better models" are off a lot, we'll know by then. It'll also be enough time for the current batch of AGW-oriented parasites to leave their careers.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the only thing that protects them from the wrath of US army...
Having China as an ally has done more for North Korea than their own military force.
I'll just note that the authors don't have 60 years of satellite altimetry and GPS data. Also, googling around I see that Tuvalu does experience land subsidence. It is claimed that this is only 10% of the total observed, but subsidence often is not constant over time.
Glancing at a graph of Tuvalu's sea level rise, I see that sea level has been basically no net gain since a peak of the early 80s. So this phenomena can easily be explained by 1950-1980 subsidence that mostly stopped by 1980. No satellite altimetry or GPS data for that period! This is the peril of making claims based on incomplete data.
It's also worth noting that none of the other islands except one graphed in the above link show this alleged effect (though Penrhyn does show some effect which might be consistent with the claimed sea level model of Becker). That is also consistent with a local subsidence effect.
But let's pass that over and go back to the original assertion that you made. Namely, that the sea level rise at Tuvalu is an AGW disaster (as I asked for). The rise happened from 1950-1980 with no net gain since. Further, carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing for the most part since the Industrial Age started. I just don't see the linkage.
Instead, what I see is a cherry picked sea level rise that has nothing to do with AGW, even if you accept Becker's work at face value.
Leveling the playing field is by definition not playing favorites.
Well, we see the definition doesn't match the reality. From now on, I suggest "interfere" in place of "level the playing field" to more accurately represent what you are proposing.
The rest of your writings, while technically correct as separate statements, all depend on the above statement of yours being correct, which it isn't.
Semantics games doesn't make my statement false.
I wouldn't call an upward spike an "epidemic". Rather I'd use language like "surge" and "retreat", or maybe "surge" and "stall" would be better (since a disease which isn't infecting new cases declines either through victims developing resistance or the deaths of the victims).
Basically, that means that *you* are in decline and debs, and *only you*.
Rebuttal: PIGS.
The thing in the EU is grown on your shit
It would have happened anyway. The EU real estate problem was at least as leveraged as its US equivalent. The collapse just started in the US. Ask yourself why Australia got off light when the US and EU got into trouble.
It explains how sea level rises are not uniform
Several mm difference per year for 60 years? I don't buy it. I'd look for alternate explanations like Tuvalu sinking (say in the areas where the measurements were taken) or the measurements were simply incorrectly taken for decades. The problem here is that the explanation now needs to be backed by evidence, not just the original measurement.
This incentive does not align with the stated goals of the marketplace (to discover the market value of something and trade goods at that value.)
Sure it does. I mentioned faster arbitrage and greater liquidity a few posts back.
You also misunderstand the point I made, thinking it somehow relates to fraud. Theoretically, the market is set up (and the SEC ensures it does) so that using publicly available information in ways to predict the financial health of companies is rewarded. However, HFT introduces a deadweight loss on the system, reducing the incentives for the person/company to seek out opportunities in the stock market.
I don't buy your opinion. What is the mechanism?
The total reward for shorting Enron remains the same- the HFTs made money- therefore it must have come at the expense of the other party to make money: the one who shorted Enron.
The third party is the group of people who react to news. With HFT, they would receive a smaller cut (because the HFT players move first). The fourth party are the market makers and day traders. They receive a smaller cut because there's someone a bit faster than they are.
There's no loss to the shorters who trade on relatively long frames and don't use automated stop loss orders or market orders (both which are HFT-scale trades!) to cover their positions.
It's troubling that we as a society are not willing to invest in our citizens.
It has to have a positive return to be an investment. For example, how do we benefit from a slightly educated person with a bunch of debt and no job experience?
There's always something to learn, and we should strive to make learning the cheapest possible source of entertainment, to encourage as many people as possible to learn as much as possible. That's what makes a society great.
My view is that what makes a society great is infrastructure. It isn't just a group of people, but a group of people with powerful tools that enable them to do a lot of stuff. Traditional stuff like electric grids or transportation networks are infrastructure that enable people to do vast amounts of work or move people and stuff to other places really fast. In that sense, education and training are particularly potent forms of infrastructure since they enable people to do and be things that they couldn't be before.
But infrastructure, even something like education isn't always a net positive benefit. For example, if you get a degree from a college that practices indoctrination instead of education and you borrowed a lot of money to do so, then how does that help you or society? You just borrowed a lot of money that is going to be hard to pay back for an "education" that neither prepares you for the world or helps you think. You probably got some things, such as "polish" (improved social skills), but you also picked a lot of problems.
This is one way that a normally valuable good, education can be turned into something that harms us all.
No everybody doesn't need to go to college
[...]
It's deeply troubling that the response to "tuitions are too high" is "not everyone needs to go to college" these days.
What's troubling? I agree that the statement is true, You agree that it's true. What's going on is that the US government is massively subsidizing education not only resulting in large increases of the cost of tuition, but also putting a lot of people in college who shouldn't be going. They got enabled and all they did was collect a bunch of the worst debt you can have in US society.
I think you mean a practical, reusable space plane that has never been man rated and never will be.
At least, it's practical. That puts it above the Shuttle which also has never been man rated and never will be.
This means whoever can get information about changes in bids and in response to that modify their own bids with the lowest latency has an advantage. I cannot see how that can be solved without introducing rounds.
It's already solved in the current market by letting the above just happen. In other words, doing nothing about it works just fine.
Who cares if they worked hard? Life isn't first grade and you don't get an "A" for effort.
Same goes for the whiny babes who want this changed.
Perverse incentives are bad. HFT adds no value.
What "perverse incentive"? Just because some are doing the Red Queen thing doesn't mean that it's the only possible game in the stock market. Trading faster is just another advantage and it is logical to take that to the extreme, such as is done with HFT. Nothing perverse about it.
Therefore things that incentivize removal of latency (short-term goals) at the expense of say, detecting and shorting the next Enron or pumping dollars into a promising startup or trading your less risk-loving dollars for a VC's so he can invest in the next startup actively hurt society.
What would do that? Slashdot has been talking about HFT for a number of years now. I don't recall anyone speaking of a HFT gimmick that would make this sort of stock fraud any easier. The problem is simply that HFT is so far removed from human-scale trading, that there is almost no interaction.
Most ills of the stock market have nothing to do with trade speed (other than they need to get the victim to trade quickly enough, that second thoughts don't get in the way or the scheme doesn't fall apart before the victim invests). I see a lot of people who think that getting rid of HFT somehow fixes these problems, at least partially. It just doesn't work that way.
HFT arbitrage largely exists because of the ability to make bids/offers with no intention of completing the transaction.
That is not arbitrage for two reasons. First, because it's not risk free. No intention of making a trade is not the same as not making a trade. There is the possibility of making a trade at an adverse price. Another HFT trader can attempt to snipe the order while it's still out there.
Second, there isn't an actual trade intended (arbitrage is risk free trading). This is an attempt to distort pricing data to fool computer trading (mostly at slower time scales).
What you propose favors those with the lowest latencies
How? Lower latency is an inherent trade advantage just like knowledge is. Reality favors those with lower latency. "Leveling the playing field" is inherently playing favorites. The playing field isn't level and the traders which are getting an advantage off of that, didn't do anything to deserve an advantage. As I see it, breaking the market to give someone an advantage just doesn't make sense.
The more participants the better the trade, otherwise the market devolves into an exchange between powerhouses that can manipulate the market derived value of the goods.
Yet two more reasons not to break the market. HFT is in addition to other traders so it is an increase in the number of traders (and of course, trades). Similarly, market manipulation is a lot chancier in a realm where someone can respond to your manipulation attempt (and profit thereby) in microseconds rather than much longer periods of time.
Take your 10ns proposal and subtract the communication latency to find out how much time is left for computations. Turns out that the communication latency alone is going to be 3-8 orders of magnitude higher.
No reason traders can't be on the same chip as a piece of the market.
Assuming 500msec per round with the above numbers the time left for computation would vary between 200msec and 500msec. That's 150% more time for the best case than the worst case, meaning traders with worst case latency must acquire hardware which is 150% faster to remain competitive. Increase the round duration to 2sec and the numbers now become 1700msec and 2000msec, only 18% difference.
And at 10 nanoseconds, that would be roughly a factor of 3,000 difference which more accurately reflects the actual difference in computational speed between the different traders.
Is it to further corrupt a country that is hanging by a thread?
I'd have to say this part is probably not correct. Corruption tends to lead to things like lax security and other cases of not doing the job. While this attack probably doesn't have much effect, I'd rather these guys be trying out the security rather than someone with more sinister motives. And maybe that embarrassment will get someone to do their job.
Right, but not without destroying millions of dollars in value, and sometimes much more than even that.
As the other poster noted, there's no indication any value was destroyed. One can't say the same of SEC meddling. Let me put it this way. If you need the SEC to protect you from little things like this, then you shouldn't be in the stock market.
All these stories about traders needing ultralow latencies is a symptom of a fundamentally broken system.
So what's broken? Before we start fixing things, shouldn't we have a problem first?
The system should be modified to be round based rather than real-time.
Real-time looks better to me.
10 seconds per round is long enough
That's a bit too long for a round. How about 10 nanoseconds instead? I might be a bit facetious here, but I see no reason to help out slower traders. The market exists to trade things, not to play favorites. Those low latency traders have to work hard to gain their modest market advantage. And that is as it should be.
In addition to the usual market benefits (such as lightning fast arbitrage and hedging, greater liquidity, etc), we also have a great arms race going on. This whole story is about a concrete spin off of HFT -- better microwave communication.
So how does an area experience sea level rises higher than actual sea level rises? By sinking. Tell me how much responsibility we creators of AGW should have for land that will vanish anyway (and in the process experience increased vulnerability to cyclones)?
Let's just hope the two don't happen at the same time
Why not? That's great timing. I think a big part of the problem is the ridiculous pessimism about our ability to adapt. We aren't just burning oil now. We're doing useful things with that. I think it's rather delusion to claim that slightly cheaper chemicals (or the modest effects of near future AGW) in 2050 or 2100 justifies huge distortions of our economy now.
Which conflict of interest is greater; a climatologist who is going to be studying climate whether AGW is occurring or not, or some of the largest companies in the world who stand to lose a considerable amount if oil use plummets or oil is priced to reflect the actual damage it's doing.
The climatologist of course since they can't make money any other way. The oil company probably will see profits go up, especially if they took the effort to diversify into the renewables market (like several have).
"Minimum advantage" still might justify the effort. As propaganda, it has value. Engineeringwise it's a mixed bag. Yes, the vehicle is likely a deathtrap, but so were a lot of early tanks. Being able to shoot without exposing yourself is an interesting development. I could see value in that by itself, say for setting up remotely operated sniper posts or machine gun nests.
If you want more accurate models, well you need more data against which to test that model. That requires time traveling into the future at the usual rate in order to collect that data.
Now this might just be a translation error (the original article was in German apparently), but I think the actual details of the story back me up. We read of more computing power, "better" models (probably meaning finer mesh sizes). We don't read of more data.
The last part of the article is interesting.
The IPCC's predictions concerning precipitation, on the other hand, may be more conservative than in the previous assessment. Computer models certainly show a clear trend: In places where it already rains a great deal, it will rain even more; and where it is currently dry, it will grow even drier. That's the theory, at least. The only problem is that, so far, these forecasts have not matched reality.
According to the models, subtropical regions, in particular, are expected to grow drier, with new arid zones appearing in the southern United States, South Africa and Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain. Real measurement data from the last 60 years, though, show no such trend toward aridity. Those regions do experience frequent dry periods, but not more often than they have in the past. One possible explanation is that the slight global warming that has occurred so far is not yet enough to cause observable changes in precipitation.
Model not matching reality to the degree needed is traditionally a sign of an inaccurate model. It may be that the models get better as time goes on. But why should one expect divergence in the short term and accuracy in the long term?
There's no scientists making vast amounts of money out of this.
James Henson and Phil Jones did quite well by this. I doubt their careers would have done so well, if they weren't such earnest proponents of AGW.
The problem here is that none of these predictions are particularly new.
They're also not backed by a lot of data. Satellite measurements are not just "refined", but actually measure for the first time the quantity of average mean global temperature (though not quite at the surface). Past about a century and a half of human weather station measurements, your proxy data becomes even more uncertain.
As to predictions, the long term predictions of these "better" models can't be gauged until we run out the clock a lot. But "medium term" predictions have been rather poor.
None of this was invented yesterday, and yet, because you have this emotional desire to reject the evidence, you shoot the messenger, declaring climatologists frauds or saying "We need more time."
So you aren't at all interested in massive conflicts of interest among the messengers and the people who fund them?
We're seeing major melt in the Arctic now, just as predicted, so how much fucking time do you want?
We're also seeing albedo changes from wildfires (soot is particularly effective for short term changes of albedo of snow). Something we probably would have seen anyway.
I think two decades would work. If those "better models" are off a lot, we'll know by then. It'll also be enough time for the current batch of AGW-oriented parasites to leave their careers.