A frank admission about the state of modeling by Dr. Gavin Schmidt

Dr. Schmidt is stating the obvious and frankly I am aghast that Taleb would make such a obviously idiotic statement. Math is exact, but as Gavin points out, essentially, garbage in –> garbage out.

Gavin is right in this case, in the social sciences and maybe also in climate science, most of the calculations are perfect; the assumptions behind the models just don’t remotely apply to the situation being studied. I have always thought Taleb only half knows what he’s talking about.
The Mann hockey stick which used principal components without centering is a notable exception; it is mathematically wrong.

Schmidt showing a shadow of a doubt in the Church of Climatology’s Delphic models? Out, out damn spot! It must be the harbinger of end of days for them …
Pointman

Wait a minute, is Gavin talking about climate models or social science models? Let’s try not to put words in his mouth that he didn’t say…
REPLY: That is a point, and I dropped the word climate from the title to be fair. But the same issues apply to climate models, perhaps even more so than social models. You have to make assumptions, you have to set starting points. Maths generally can be debugged quickly, assumptions, not so much. – Anthony

@climateofgavin @nntaleb Sounds a lot like “Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science” (Wegman)— Les Johnson (@LesJohnsonHrvat) June 1, 2013

jfk,
Statistically wrong but not mathematically wrong, after all all the numbers added up the way Mann wanted them, I presume.

Every engineer learns the saying “it works in theory”. This is the real difference between science and engineering. Scientists develop theories about what should happen. Engineers try to use those theories to predict in real world situations what actually does happen.
Perhaps Climate “Science” is finally learning after many decades what any scientist in an engineering company learns in the first few weeks of their job?

But is anyone on that side, even Gavin, willing to concede that reality trumps models?
That’s the big question.

If you want Nassim Taleb’s opinion about anyone who claims they can predict anything about the future based on statistical modelling, read his book The Black Swan. His thesis is that you cannot predict a future calamity. The only way you can prepare for it is to have a surplus of wealth that allows you to recover from whatever happens. This is very similar to Lomborg’s thesis, which may not be too surprising given that they are both economists.

Here’s an excel spreadsheet comparing observed temperatures vs. model projection from: Hansen (1988), IPCC FAR (1990), IPCC SAR (1995) and IPCC TAR (2001), in pretty charts.
It can be updated as more observations are added.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78507292/Climate%20Models.xlsx

Rocky Road–
No because the purpose of theories and models in the social sciences is not to reflect reality but to change it. The theory or model exist to gain implementation to change behaviors. That’s the purpose.
It is also why you hear the phrase Best Practices so often. It is a practice that can change human behavior in desired directions if Statism is your goal.

Russ R. says:
June 1, 2013 at 10:12 am
Nice spreadsheet! Thanks.

The gravy train is now running so slow that even stalwarts of AGW are leaping off it.

[snip – off topic slayers junk science -mod]

Rings a bell:
“If the administration knew about the problems and chose not to prevent them, then clearly something is rotten in the state of modeling”

WRT jfk’s comment highlighted by Mr Watts. I’m sure that most people are like myself, that they do not expect perfection from science and that it can be a messy business at times. I would never expect climate modeling to be highly accurate, based on my own understanding of the current science.
The thing is, it is the scientists themselves that have been claiming the accuracy of their models for many years now. They have failed to show proper humility. We now have these IPCC conferences where a bunch of them endeavour to pressure the rest of the world to re-engineer, from the top down, the entire world economy, based primarily but not entirely on these models.
It is not the failure of statistical modeling that is the underlying issue. It is the failure of the majority of scientists, and of world leaders, to acknowledge the weakness in climate models. Without the cabal of global warming alarmists and the IPCC, nobody would be highlighting comments like these from individuals like Gavin Schmidt.
Mr Watts is doing us all a service by doing so.

Ryan says:
June 1, 2013 at 11:58 am
““The same issues applies to climate models.”
Says you, Anthony.
I highly doubt Gavin would have made such a statement about climate models and if you read the comments here it is very clear that your readers think he was talking about climate.”
No, Ryan. We have understood it. Please try reading our comments again and with less haste.

Totally fair to make the connection. Gavin probably doesn’t realize the implication on his own, so making the connection for him is a service for us all.

Greg Goodman (June 1, 2013 at 10:04 am) wrote:
“what also comes as a surprise is that this relationship implies there is a relationship between these variations in climate and the timing of major volcanic events. Now that merits further study.”
Certainly it does merit further study, but it’s not a good sign if it comes as a surprise.
Let’s give credit where it’s due:
Ulric Lyons has been directing attention towards this for years.
Years later along comes a different messenger with the same message and the new messenger is hailed by wuwt readers as a hero. Frankly: Too funny.
This clarifies and acutely emphasizes that the readership here overwhelmingly bases trust on messenger rather than message.
Tip for anyone looking into this: You can get well ahead the new messenger if you just go back and pay attention to what Ulric Lyons & Piers Corbyn have been saying for years.

Ryan says: “… if you read the comments here it is very clear that your readers think he was talking about climate.”
Buzzzz, wrong. Anthony was clear as to what Gavin was Tweeting about, and readers here understood Gavin was referencing social models.

Well I don’t think it matters a hill of beans, whether Dr Schmidt was discussing social “science” (there’s a laffer ), of finance “science” (another one) or climate science.
Math is almost never wrong. After all, we made it all up ourselves, and defined how it was to be used. Well you can simply fail to add correctly, and you could use the wrong maths, but so long as you use the wrong maths correctly it will give the answers you would expect to get when you use the wrong math correctly.
But clearly the problem is that the model assumptions do not mimic reality.
If the sun beats down on a clear sky earth, at about 1kW/m^2 normal to the sun vector; but in your model, you use 240 W/m^2, or some other made up fictional number, that absolutely nobody, ever actually measured, anywhere on earth; well wake me up if you get the correct result, that matches reality.
A tornado with 200 mph winds can do a lot of damage, but if you use 50 mph, instead of the measured 200 mph, you won’t get much damage at all in your model.
So nyet Gavin; nothing wrong with maths, but maybe wrong maths; but first you have to model what is real.

“if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.” – Richard Feynman
“No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.” – Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – Ernest Rutherford
http://pathstoknowledge.net/think/

Where is Mann? So much debunking of global warming this past week and I haven’t seen any tweets from him. Is he on vacation?

Analogy with things we study in social issues? How about that wonderful word ‘inoperative’ and its rich history? Or the streaker’s defence – it seemed like a good idea at the time. Or LBJ’s Theorem which here becomes ‘it’s better for politicians to have the greens inside the tent p***ing out than conversely’.

Max Hugoson says:
June 1, 2013 at 2:28 pm
Max, it worse than that… they have to get ALL THE BOUNDARY conditions right too. Which in reality must be matched by the direction of change in each boundary variable for the first step of the first calculation. And as we all know they are also trying to model a chaotic & stochastic system. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Mike jarosz (June 1, 2013 at 1:23 pm) wrote:
Nothing happens in the U.S. as far as treaties without 2/3 of the U.S Senate approval. Last vote in 1997 was 95 to 0 against destroying the U.S. economy to save the planet. They may be stupid liberals, but they’re not crazy.
No treaties needed when the Executive is allowed to rule by bureaucratic fiat (i.e. the EPA).

The models and assumptions worked fine, until they hit reality. Once the sunlight was let in it revealed garbage science, it is an excellent disinfectant. People are going to get badly burnt and they can either scurry back to the shadows or cover up with some reality. It will be interesting who chooses to do neither and stay in the sunlight naked.

What I meant to add to my last post is that there will be three types of climate scientists, I think Mann will scurry, Dr Scmidt looks like a scurrier but I think will in the end cover up and Dana and Cook are going to stay naked and burn.

The task ahead is not to debunk several assumptions individual computational climate models may be based on, but to debunk the entire modelling paradigm as it is practiced in contemporary climate science.
What they are doing is to fit multiple, mutually inconsistent computational models of high Kolmogorov complexity to a single run of a unique physical instance (the “climate system”), which is far too large to fit into the lab, therefore can never be studied experimentally. Even observational evidence of the system’s unrepeatable history is patchy at best and for basic parameters (like “Planck weighted average thermal IR optical depth of the atmosphere” or “short wave planetary albedo”) are lacking.
This is why the concept of experimentum crucis can never be applied in this field of inquiry to incrementally eliminate models of poor performance and choose unequivocally between the few remaining competitors.
With enough free parameters to draw detailed representations of superheroes in comics, any such model can be fitted to any history, which means even if their basic assumptions are mutually exclusive, none of them can be falsified. This dire situation is supposed to be rectified by the slogan “All models are wrong, but some are useful”, with no operational definition of the concept “useful”, of course. Which makes choosing the useful ones arbitrary, to be based on preferences unrelated to the actual subject matter.
No wonder predictions of these models diverge widely. They would even more, if “useless” models were included, whose predictions utterly defy (political?) expectations.
The climate community responded to lack of falsifiability, mutual inconsistency & diverging predictions of models in a most curious way. They have invented the concept of “ensemble average”, which is supposed to “wash out” individual quirks of models and produce an outcome which, in a mysterious way, comes closer to reality than any member of said ensemble. However, we can see clearly, that ensemble average can only mirror the fuzzy concept of “useful” at best (preferences of “experts”), nothing else.
The other device introduced to fight uncertainty is the concept of “projection” (as opposed to prediction), which is justified by the existence of several different future “scenarios”, but which, in fact, is good for nothing but to kick unpredictability under the rug. In a sane world it could easily be replaced by genuine predictions over the field of all possible scenarios (emission trajectories & whatnot), but that would make them all too vulnerable to falsification.
The entire hullabaloo is justified by the phrase “there is no other way to make predictions in climate science than by modelling”, with the additional hidden assumption that with modelling it is indeed possible. But, as we have seen above, this hidden assumption is untenable. Which, if we suppose the the first proposition concerning models was true, would imply the unpredictability of climate. But that conclusion is never drawn.
The grave process described above has effectively slipped climate science down on a slippery slope to the level of a full fledged pseudoscience, where outcomes are not determined by nature, but wishful thinking and expectations.
________________________________________
Note all pseudosciences are organized around issues of utmost practical importance (health, fate, inexhaustible energy). On the other hand genuine science never even tries to be practical. The Earth with all its wonderful weather phenomena is something, but who’d care how optical depth determines the statistics of temperature distribution in a fluid, enclosed in a semitranspatent container, put onto a thermally well insulated rotating table in a pith black vacuum chamber whose walls are kept cool by liquid nitrogen wile irradiated by powerful lasers or such? No one but a bunch of weirdo scientists.
Still, that’s the only path that holds some chance to understand climate, because practical appliations usually come quite late in the game, if ever.
For genuine science does right the opposite climate modellers are trying to do. It seeks a single consistent model of low Kolmogorov complexity (a.k.a. “simple”), applicable to multiple runs of a wide class of physical entities, with certain members of said class being suitable to be studied experimentally in the lab.
With no general understanding of closed non-equilibrium quasi steady state thermodynamic systems with a vast number of nonlinearly coupled internal degrees of freedom, radiatively coupled to their environment (one of the many gaping holes in semi-classical physics) one has no hope to make any progress in bringing back climate science to the narrow path which may (or may not) lead to salvation.

Robin says:
June 1, 2013 at 8:54 am
“I just finished reading the UN’s Post-2015 plans for all of us so I wouldn’t get too excited that anyone is seeing the light. They are using climate change literally as the basis for remaking societies, economies, and new mindsets and values.”
There is currently a huge lovefest of ICLEI / Agenda 21 in Bonn, Germany, and you might not be surprised that all they talk about is how The Climate Change is the most serious problem for the development of cities (and that while the planet hasn’t warmed in 15 years)
You can’t make it up:
http://www.iclei.org/en/our-activities/our-agendas/resilient-city/resilient-cities-2013-live-blog/day-2.html

Unlike most here, I’m something of a fan of Gavin’s despite his CAGW promotion efforts. He is usually very precise in his use of language, as a good scientist should be. When Gavin says ‘assumption’, I think he means exactly that.
Assumption – something taken for granted
As opposed to a theoretical prediction.
Gavin is saying that something outside of the theoretical basis for the model, we haven’t really considered, is an important determinant of what happens. In the context of climate models, he is saying is, that important stuff, we don’t know much about, is missing from the climate models.
Which is a position many here could agree with.

Robin is correct when he wrote above
“Basically education creates the desired new mindsets with few accurate facts and lots of erroneous supplied concepts that filter daily perceptions in predictable ways. Then media reenforces by what it covers and does not.”
This is very visible in other areas of science as well as that of climate. For example, Monsanto, whcih has taken over swathes of the US goverment and even its legal system by strategic placement of former company officials, is also now susidising educational establishments. It lobbies goverments and the EU relentlessly
Meanhwile the worldwide ‘March on Monsanto’ against GMOs in which hundreds of thousands participated was met with a blanket blackout, save for a tiny mention on CNN.
And as with ‘climate science’, the entire food testing system is now in the hands of people paid to poduce a certain result, favourable to those who pump us full of chemicals, preservatives and sterile GMOs. The very few independent scientists who attempt to publish non-food industy-funded research highlighting the dangers of this new kind of ‘food’ find their reputations trashed and their jobs terminated, all with not a peep from the MSM
The purchase and subsequent perversion of science is very far advanced, in all areas

The point that Anthony is making here is that Gavin is holding others to higher standards than he holds himself to, so Anthony’s entire post is right on the mark.

The problem with the Gavin’s like models is both mathematical and physical.
These models fail to properly reconstruct the climate oscillations at multiple scales such as the multidecadal-to-millennial ones. Thus, they are missing proper physics. The missing physics has to do with astronomical forcings of the climate and with the climate response to them because the missed oscillations are synchronous to astronomical oscillations related to the sun, to the moon and to the planets in general.
The models also fail mathematically because to recover the 20th century warming despite the missing physics, they have exaggerate the GHG effect by arbitrary parameterization of the internal feedbacks of the models.
All these things are clearly explained in my papers. For example in
Scafetta N., 2012. Testing an astronomically based decadal-scale empirical harmonic climate model versus the IPCC (2007) general circulation climate models. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, 124-137.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682611003385
and more recently in
Scafetta N., 2013. Discussion on common errors in analyzing sea level accelerations, solar trends and global warming. Pattern Recognition in Physics, 1, 37–57. (open access)
http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/1/37/2013/prp-1-37-2013.pdf
In particular, in the latter paper (in particular in section 2) there is a detailed discussion of the mathematical/physical errors made also by Gavin to exaggerate the man-made global warming.
There it is demonstrated that the GISS model underestimate the solar signature on climate by a very large factor both at the decadal and millennial scale.

Mike jarosz says:
June 1, 2013 at 1:23 pm
Nothing happens in the U.S. as far as treaties without 2/3 of the U.S Senate approval. Last vote in 1997 was 95 to 0 against destroying the U.S. economy to save the planet. They may be stupid liberals, but they’re not crazy.

You are assuming that they did not vote against the treaty because it would have taken away power from them.
As for volcanos, don’t make the same mistake as climate scientists . Do not assume that the last 100 years is a normal iteration in anyway NATURALLY to the state of affairs on a 4 billion year old planet that has cycles volcanically, weather, and in its climate system that we can not even dream of. In other words, you do not have enough data to make any assumptions about future volcanic eruptions. Any predictions based on 100 years of data are nothing but conjecture and in essence a blind-ass guess which is what climate scientists do. Please don’t scare people in other words on something you do not know anything about. Perhaps there will be an eruption in 2018. Perhaps CAGW will hit and prove us sceptics all wrong. Perhaps a unicorn will fart in China and cause a huge hurricane to hit the US. I have not studied any of these topics to give you a probability based on educated guesses, but I can tell you that the probability of having a volcanic eruption in 2018 is the same as it is for the year 2017 and just a tad lower than that of 2016 when leap year gives an extra day via our calender to make the event just that slightly more likely.
So if you are a betting man, I will bet on 2016 and take my chances with the extra day. If I was you, I would do the same thing if you are betting on the future.

The folks that spend their time studying ENSO statistical and dynamical models are having the same discussions. The old standby statistical models have, in my opinion, out-performed the newer dynamical models in predicting what the ENSO pattern will be. What is interesting is that there is a group of scientists who meet to discuss the whole enchalada and then make a “consensus” guess as to what the oceans and atmosphere will do. This week the consensus dipped below both the dynamical models (which always seem to favor boiling oceans), and the statistical models (which are never as El Nino-ish as the dynamical models are). Could it be that models have lost their shine in all climate circles?

Dere’s eben more smoke commin’ out da machine

DirkH says:
June 1, 2013 at 9:14 am
Now maybe I’m wrong, and the GCM’s don’t assume hydrostasis. If a climate modeler reads this and can show that I’m wrong I would be interested in source links. Thanks.

I’d like the see the answer to this as well.

There is no such thing as a error in Maths. Mathematics is *always* correct. By definition. The models are not Mathematical Models. They are Physical Models. Physical Models *always* are in error. *always*. The question is whether or not the error is larger than the process being modeled. In the case of Climate Models the error *is* much larger than the process being modeled (i.e. man made co2 vs natural variation as a cause of the observed increase in temperature following the last ice age).

Taleb is talking about mathematical models, and the way I read Schmidt’s tweet that he agreed with Taleb to a degree that there are always math errors, but his reply highlighted faulty assumptions for model error.
I don’t know the complete context of the discussion, but I don’t think Taleb would make the challenge unless he could back it up. Schmidt is no dummy, either, ant it is possible they are talking past each other.
Taleb’s latest book, “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder” is a good read.

PiperPaul says:
June 1, 2013 at 11:45 pm
People that say, “maths”, instead of just “math” are almost as annoying as people who constantly want to “raise my awareness”.
Nah! It’s you colonials who get it wrong – I suggest you raise your awareness … 🙂

If [self snip] Gavin doesn’t [self snip] say hello to all his [self snip] fans at Watts Up With [self snip] That. Then I’m just not going to tell him how much I love him. I’m kidding! I think he’s full of crap.

This song is for Gavin.

PiperPaul says:
June 1, 2013 at 11:45 pm
People that say, “maths”, instead of just “math” are almost as annoying as people who constantly want to “raise my awareness”.
Maths is a contraction of mathematics, a noun, math appears to be a contraction of mathematic, usually mathematical, and adjective here being used as a noun in math.
There are a lot of words used in the US from the older usage in England, what was a common language a few centuries ago in both places changed in England and didn’t in the US – “ain’t” is the one I recall being given as an example, so, I’ve looked up math and it fits in with this:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/mathematics
“Definition of mathematics
noun
[usually treated as singular]the abstract science of number, quantity, and space, either as abstract concepts ( pure mathematics), or as applied to other disciplines such as physics and engineering ( applied mathematics):
a taste for mathematics•[often treated as plural] the mathematical aspects of something:
James immerses himself in the mathematics of baseball
Origin:
late 16th century: plural of obsolete mathematic ‘mathematics’, from Old French mathematique, from Latin (ars) mathematica ‘mathematical (art)’, from Greek mathēmatikē (tekhnē), from the base of manthanein ‘learn'”

Myrrh,
It is “Math”. take a deep breath and calm down fatty!! 🙂

Sparks says:
June 2, 2013 at 1:38 am
Myrrh,
It is “Math”. take a deep breath and calm down fatty!! 🙂
Twit.

Is Gavin Schmidt close to retirement? I suspect that we will see more of these mea-culpas as the guilty parties lock in their taxpayer funded pensions, and leave the public eye. They know that they are wrong, that they’ve been wrong for years. Can they not be sued by the taxpayers to claw their pensions back?

“Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality.”
Albert Einstein

garymount says:
June 2, 2013 at 6:02 am
“But the computer system that these models have to run on have severe limitations.
Almost every math calculation done increases the errors and so to compensate you have to us large significant digits, which means more memory and if you exceed the natural maximum size of the machine, for example you use 128 bits or 256 bits on a 64 bit machine, there are extra CPU cycles or clock ticks which increases the time to do the enormous numbers of calculations. ”
It is far far worse than that.
An increase of precision, say from 32 bit to 256 bit, gives you a constant factor of 8 of overhead. One could live with that ; if an unreliable simulation became reliable simply by increasing the computer power by a factor of 8, this would be splendid.
But the very definition of a chaotic system – the mathematical definition of chaos – is exactly that the deviation between the real system and a finite resolution simulation of the system grows beyond all bounds as time progresses. If the deviation does not grow beyond all bounds then the system is not chaotic.
(Where deviation does not mean the error in one metric like “average global temperature” but the deviation of the state of real system vs. the simulated system. A suitable metric might be a vector difference between the respective state vectors.)
NO constant increase in precision suffices to suppress the deviation under a predetermined bound. Not an increase to 256 bit, not an increase to 1024 bit, not an increase to a million bit.

@ Berényi Péter says:
June 1, 2013 at 4:09 pm
A thoughtful post, aiming to deal the the nub of the matter, or at least that part which is reflected in the processes that claim to justify these models as having a legitimacy based on reality.
Virtually all commentary on this issue concerns itself – when looking at the “science” or “technical” aspects – with what is essentially nit-picking. This may be understandable, and may have been a necessary response, at least from some, in past years. However, as is always the case when fundamentals are overlooked or assumed by participants in such an area of contention, which is depressingly normal as perspectives are suborned and subsumed by the course dictated by the dominant proponents of anything, simple understandings which underpin the entire edifice, and which, if looked at properly, render all the noise and fury moot, lose their essential place.
It is obvious, and has always been obvious, that this issue has no intellectual underpinnings that justify a public policy response. This has nothing to do with science; it is about a (moderate) application of intelligence and the obligation to recognize the results of that.
The precise nature of what has happened to “science” which independently of public policy response has plainly failed to the point of non-existence, must be seen and known.
I think your distinction – almost a definition – between science and psuedo-science as being in effect related to the nature of intent, and the cultural context in which this occurs, is interesting.
It is clear that, not just in science, human undertakings developed over centuries which require and reflect certain sensibilities, practices, and disciplines, have been comprehensively polluted.
Without addressing these things at a foundational level, which cannot be done without reviewing the basic principles and identifying where, how, and why they have been perverted, nothing can be done, regardless of who or what “wins” in any one issue including this.
Your delineation between scientists and modellers as being in fact antithetical is – like most things that go to the bone – simply and convincingly put. There will be of course many who will argue that such a distinction cannot be made with such certainty, and will claim a legitimate synthesis born of necessity, utility, and superior evolution of understanding. I very much doubt that away from all the noise such people might make, they would be able to justify this on first principles.
In any case this is the level things really depend on, and this is the level that has failed. This approach is the only way to retrieve reality and meaning.

Gavin disappoints.
Sorry. No-one had said it.

Gavin Schmidt is the mouthpiece for a working consortium of funds scamming frauds who had their work surprisingly highlighted by Al Gore in his comeback tour after losing the election.
When the searchlight came onto what they were doing and came apart Big Al just kept upping the ante declaring George Bush the man he lost to, a terrorist: financing terrorists who got their money from oil proceeds.
Gavin Schmidt and Englishman Phil Jones were involved with the weather scam,
Al Gore’s financial partners with whom he scammed the Carbon Sin Forgiveness Certificates
were in Germany.
Oddly enough, the MAIN group of people who NEVER BOUGHT Al Gore’s end-of-the-world story
were Creationists.
The entire rest of the world went along with it declaring it “flat earth” to not admit it – while the men modeling Green House Gases laughed among themselves because their Stefan – Boltzmann mathematics pertains to a FLAT circle: the earth, as flat.
The entire scam is massive political crime, from Hansen to Gore himself, to Schmidt and Mann and Jones, to Trenberth with his “Wow, there’s more heat coming out, than going in”
“budget” of energy for the earth, drawn up while he was high on who-knows what.
No one has any regard for a pure sycophant lackey. Only people looking for a reason to further the lackey’s story have anything to do with them.
Gore, Hansen, Schmidt, Trenberth, tried to take a frigid nitrogen bath with a shot of water added, as a phase change refrigeration component of the cooling
that had a warm solid rock at the bottom of it, swirling submerged in it at a thousand miles per hour
into a big warm blankie, that was going to get ever hotter until the end of the world.
Unless we all just went ahead and installed Al Gore’s energy policies in spite of the election.
So Big Al could jack up the price of the Alternative Energy stocks his dad had left him, in oil/alternative energy giant, ‘Occidental Oil.’
———-
Then as one last insult Al Gore sold his cable company to Al Jazeera: the corporate property of the Oil Baron Royalty of Oman.
Just to let you guys know that if you don’t mobilize the media for Al,
he won’t be bothered to mobilize the media, for you.
Oil financed terror or not.
That’s who Gavin Schmidt is: the gum on the heel of the shoe, of the heel of the story.
A sycophant nobody whose sole claim to notoriety is as the mouthpiece for the biggest energy markets scam in 75 years.

Hi Anthony – Climate models are engineering code with quite a few tunable parameters, and fitting functions in their parameterization of clouds, precipitation, land-atmospheric interfacial fluxes, long- and short-wave radiative flux divergences, etc. Only a part of these models are basic physics representations – the pressure gradient force, advection, the Coriolis effect.
The tunable parameters and fitting functions are developed by adjustment from real world data and a higher resolution models (which themselves are engineering code), but only for a quite small subset of real world conditions.
I discuss this issue in depth in my book
Pielke Sr, R.A., 2013: Mesoscale meteorological modeling. 3rd Edition, Academic Press, in press. http://www.amazon.com/Mesoscale-Meteorological-Modeling-International-Geophysics/dp/0123852374/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1370191013&sr=8-2&keywords=mesoscale+meteorological+modeling
The multi-decadal global climate model projections, when run in a hindcast mode for the last several decades are showing very substantial errors, as I summarize in the article
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/b-18preface.pdf

Phil, you’re funny.
You posted a graph that shows sea level rise from 1992 as if that proves something, and it’s even deliberately scaled to look alarming. You’ll have to try harder than that. Read what I wrote, since you quoted it.
Do you not understand the word “Alarming”?

@ commieBob
I argued against Feynman’s general statement: “one falsification and the theory is falsified forever” by pointing out that a falsification of theory, or law is invariably overcome by an ad hoc explanation. You argued “against” this by providing an example where saving Ohm’s Law requires the ad hoc explanation that electrical resistance varies with temperature, hence my remark about Myrrh. It is logically impossible to support the Feynman quote by providing contradictory examples. If you wish to support Feynman’s statement then you must do so by providing evidence in favour of it.
This has nothing directly to do with students, climastrologists etc; it is a matter of logic and what actually happens in science.

The Pompous Git says:
June 3, 2013 at 6:58 pm
… If you wish to support Feynman’s statement then you must do so by providing evidence in favour of it. …

I have no desire whatsoever to defend Feynman’s statement. Any theory, law, or equation is an approximation of reality. Any engineer who loses sight of that will eventually end up in serious deep doo-doo.
A counter-example does not always invalidate a theory. The fact that a cannon ball falls faster than a feather does not invalidate the laws of gravity. It does, however, demonstrate that the laws of gravity do not account for all the factors that may determine how fast a feather falls.

… This has nothing directly to do with students, climastrologists etc; it is a matter of logic and what actually happens in science. …

Actually, I have spent a fair portion of my career working with and among scientists. What actually happens in science is quite removed from what most people think actually happens in science. In particular, the vision of the scientist, as an idealistic, dispassionate seeker-of-truth, is mostly wrong. Scientists suffer from biases, cognitive blind-spots and outright stupidity just as much as the rest of us. 🙂 Nobody escapes the human condition*.
Anyway Pompous, we seem to be talking at cross-purposes because I had no idea that the conversation was about Feynman.
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*The Human Condition – “the agonising, underlying, core, real question in all of human life, of are humans good or are we possibly the terrible mistake that all the evidence seems to unequivocally indicate we might be?” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_condition