You have to wonder- what were these guys thinking? The only media visual they could have chosen that would send a worse message of forecast certainty was a dart board…or maybe something else?
MIT’s “wheel of climate” – image courtesy Donna Coveney/MIT
The Greenhouse Gamble: Ronald Prinn, director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, and his group have revised their model that shows how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century without substantial policy change. Standing with the group’s “roulette wheel” are, from left to right, Mort Webster, professor in the Engineering Systems Division; Adam Schlosser, principal research scientist at the Center for Global Change Science; Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry; and Sergey Paltsev, principal research scientist, MIT Energy Initiative.
Popular Science writes:
It’s time to call your bookie, because the line on global warming is in. A new paper from MIT breaks down the odds of different outcomes from global warming, based on whether governments take action now or later. And if you’re taking that action, bet on “government getting involved” to beat the spread, as last week an important climate change bill made it out committee in the House of Representatives.
The bill, named the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would institute a cap-and-trade program, and reduce carbon emissions by 17 percent over fifteen years. The plan also calls for increased research into alternative energy, and provides $750 billion in subsidies to consumers to help offset the increase in energy cost the bill would cause.
See the compete article here
With that kind of cash payout, and since an MIT odds calculating machine is involved in making the modeling forecasts over 400 model runs, maybe this would be a more appropriate prop for the MIT photo op:
Someone suggested a word balloon parody for the pic,
Here’s a link to motivational parody generator site, sorry no balloon.
http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php
And here’s mine!
http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b238/XY-SATAN/Climategamble.jpg
(If I knew the code to hyper link a pic, I could post it, could someone post it please 🙂 )
This seems like a great place for this quote:
Regarding how much radiation an astronaut is exposed to:
From: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/27may_phantomtorso.htm
“Scientists can estimate this radiation dose using computer models, but a computer model and real-life can be two wildly different things. Until now, researchers weren’t sure whether their models accurately predicted the radiation dose astronauts experience in space. “
The real question is, why only US sea level rise?
That’s not a roulette wheel.
That is the computer model.
They just put weights on the back and spun it 400 hundred times!
Adam from Kansas (09:41:31) :
Adam,
thank you for the link. I will be a regular there now.
Came across this one while helping my son with a report on Mark Twain, and immediately thought of AGW!
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
Adolfo Giurfa (13:47:06) :
A chemical to stop melanin production in skin tissues (in order to comply with recommended whiteness): Anthraquinone.
It affects the liver a little but taking it will increase your skin’s albedo.
______________
isn’t that which Michael jackson did to become white? Maybe Cho and Gore will start saying that every “dark skin” people should get depigmentation therapy and soon they will tell people not to get a tan during the summer. Where will all that junk science stop?
jeff,
I saw that today also. I may be a paranoid one but that, coupled with the MIT press release and another one I saw where the U of Florida released another methane gas exploding from the tundra ( there’s some irony ) press release has me convinced that these guys are working hand in hand trying to manipulate the public. These things happen too often for it not to be a coincidence.
Bruce Foutch
Politicians also need to relax after a long day,” says ‘Miss Dina’
Clearly they’re getting in practice to shaft the rest of us…
Molon Labe (00:46:55) :
Thank you so much for putting that youtube link to Richard Feynmans videos. I’ve had Revelations from just watching this series.
His dad was freakin marvelous and I’m one of the same thinking. Sometimes I just don’t understand the silly over complicated mathematical thinking when it comes to simple understanding. We humans are hardwired to over complicate things to the extreme, and like Mr. Feynmans(Senior) was trying to show.
Laws of natural and known science theory should be able to be explained in simple terms.
To me, mathematics was a rigid why of looking at things. Trying to understand KOS with mathematical equations is not truly understanding something.
Kind of like someone who wants to play an instrument. Say a guitar, because they really want to play and learn.
Some well sit for hours and years in classes to understand theory, chord pasterns, riff/progression worked out of sheet music or tabs.
Another person will pick it up and almost naturally play, some not ever having any musical theory. An ear for music, a divine or phonetic understanding that may seem like their using little effort.
Now a computer is almost 100% needed strictly or statistically to ascertain modern warmer science these days.
Any scientist who is a warmer doomsdayer, concocting proxies and ignoring real data should have been fired for incompetence.
You’re right, it will never happen! 🙂
Thanks again
Lance from Victoria BC Canada
John Galt (12:40:52) : (or was it Don Shaw (11:50:00))
If we were interested in putting words in other people’s mouths, a story about this should have the headline “Nobel Laureate and Energy Secretary Chu calls on Americans to reverse the Urban Heat Island effect.”
At the very least, the new stories make a good reply to anyone saying that UHI is negligible. Even the IPCC can’t refute it without criticizing gov’t bureaucrats and Nobel Prize winners.
BTW, there’s more white in the world than TiO2. There’s lotsa of CaCO3 that could be used as part of carbon sequestration. Of course, we’d have to make jokes about the whitewashing the UHI effect and the cyclomaniacs here would have to refer to the start of this blog – comparing different white coatings on Stevenson Screens. Anthony was ahead of our times!
White roof’s? This UK car ad could be the future 😉
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2008/may/21/ford.kuga
MartinGAtkins,
Thanks for the links to the stereo images. Could you return and explain their significance?
Thanks.
last summer, climate researcher Andreas Sterl of the Dutch KNMI, published his findings in the Geophysical Research Letters about the maximum temperatures in the Netherlands around the years 2090/2100 … his PC forecasted some 8°C warmer maximums than those that occur now, and the Netherlands, and Belgium, would experience summer maximums of around 40° C, making them part of the Sahara of the North …
clearly, predicting less is a no go … one does not even make page 37 anymore with a prediction of a rather robust 6°C increase in temperature in a century … therefore my prediction is that the next prediction will be more than 10°+ increase by 2100 if we don’t give ourselves up to the Goracle and his allies … and I have to admit, I cannot wait to read them …
because, just as Wall Street analysts came crashing down when they were forecasting higher and higher stock prices, also the Alarmists will be overtaken by their own words … the (silent) majority of the world’s population has other things to do than to believe their idiotic ramblings, and because of that, their ramblings will become ever and ever more idiotic, thereby digging their own grave … unfortunately, because of their goals being the same as those of the everyday politician, namely get people’s money and thoughts, this might take a few years … but the end result is set already …
When I was doing my PhD at the U.of Waterloo, ON, we had regular mathematiciens at our residence, some in Applied and some in Pure. They were convinced that the Universe could be represented by a single equation. Seeing how models have become more important that the real physical observations, I tend to think that regardless of what the Universal equation returns, the Universe, of course, will be wrong, but never the equation.
all universities have socialist-activists. a lot prolly go into poli sci, philosophy, and enviro sciences.
“”” Ray (09:10:27) :
When I was doing my PhD at the U.of Waterloo, ON, we had regular mathematiciens at our residence, some in Applied and some in Pure. “””
Well that’s interesting; when I was doing my Bachelors, in Physics and Mathematics; I had to do both Pure and Applied as majors, to get credited with a degree in Mathematics. Somehow I ended up with three Physics majors on top of that, for the dual credit in Physics and Mathematics. I guess times have changed; unless schools have.
Well I hope those “mathematiciens” understood that their mathematics is all pure fiction; we made it all up in our heads; and nothing we talk about in mathematics, actually exists anywhere in the real universe.
That doesn’t stop mathematiciens from believing that somehow mathematics is universal truth. So how do they explain that a circle is just a special case of an ellipse in Euclidean Geometry; but is a special case of a hyperbola in porjective geometry.
George
And in Projective geometry too !
George E. Smith (13:44:21) :
This was a graduate degree residence and often we had invited professors living with us for a while. We had some great conversations, but I remember those pure Math profs trying to figure out how to make the toaster work… priceless.
MIT “scientists” advising Lawyers in congress with this marketing prop? Scarey. The marketing guy in the suit is smiling because he knows that will be an easy sell.
Here is what the MIT report leads to:
Reuters: Climate change causes 315,000 deaths a year-report
Thu, 28 May 2009 22:22:42 GMT
quote——–“The study, commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF), estimates that climate change seriously affects 325 million people every year, a number that will more than double in 20 years to 10 percent of the world’s population (now about 6.7 billion).”
“Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” Kofi Annan, former U.N. secretary-general and GHF president, said in a statement.
“The first hit and worst affected are the world’s poorest groups, and yet they have done least to cause the problem.” Annan urged governments due to meet at U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December to agree on an effective, fair and binding global pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s main mechanism for tackling global warming. ———-end quote
Its guess its a good thing we were so proactive in burning food for fuel with the bio-fuels alternative energy program. Its been almost as good for poor countries as saving them from the horrors of DDT. Just what do these people think is going to happen to help the worlds poorest countries when the economies of the western world are wrecked? MIT-now working to reduce the worlds population. (In ways that the worlds population will not like.)
@george and Ray…
My first teacher of statistics, Professor Garza, used to say: “Mathematics is a tool, not a means to discern truth.” If I’m not wrong, it was Pascal’s thought.
George,
You are already off on the wrong foot in my book.
There are no real circles in the universe. Anywhere. All we have are n sided approximations where n is very very large (in most cases). And that would be if you could make something that was “perfectly” round. Which you can’t. There are always deviations – and then you get to the greatest deviation of all – the atomic level. Things get bumpy down there.
James P (00:46:16) :
Bruce Foutch
Politicians also need to relax after a long day,” says ‘Miss Dina’
Clearly they’re getting in practice to shaft the rest of us…
The girls in Copenhagen aren’t cheap either!
I have coined a term for what the warmists are up to politically:
The Great Leap Backwards