Bishop Hill writes:
There is video available here of a lecture given by Professor Mike Hulme entitled “How do Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority?”. Hulme asks whether deference towards climate models is justified and whether we should have confidence in them. I think the answer is “We don’t know”.
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/195/media-gallery.htm
NOTE: Chances are the volume of heavy WUWT induced traffic may “crash” the CRASSH server, bookmark for later if you don’t get a response.
Politicians in a democracy need something to hang their hats on, so to speak, in order to lend an air of legitimacy to their actions (increasing government power). I think it’s a fair assumption that ‘useful idiots’ (consciously or not) are helping to create an illusion of legitimacy for sweeping government action.
The relationship is a bit too cozy from where I sit.
Barry Woods says:
October 22, 2010 at 10:47 am
IPCC Third Assessment Report:
“In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
It is possible for climate models to predict a linear trend line to hit the walls of a non-linear chaotic progression faster than previously imagined. Failure simply comes faster than the press can megaphone it in. Millions are watching intently as Climate Scientists backpeddle.
Get the science debate going on at The Air Vent questionning Models’ response to Condensation as a low pressure effect on weather.
Blimey, listening to Mr Hulme I can feel myself slowly slip into a coma.
Why use ten words when you can use five hundred really complicated words that make you sound really clever and important?
I managed about twenty minutes of that twaddle. If he’s got something to say, I wish he’d just say it instead of wiffling on about epistemics and heuristics.
For me, the guy is an abysmal communicator – life’s just too short to wade through all that ridiculous verbiage.
The weather/climate system is a chaotic one. To model this needs the certain knowledge of all inputs, both magnitude and direction, to get anything like a sane answer. We do not know this system as well as we think we do so our models are wrong.
We know, from the daily weather forecasts, that after only two days there can be great variation between the forecast and actuality. If a three day forecast is a problem then to forecast the next 50/100 years is crass stupidity.
I think Berniel makes some very astute comments. His own article is worth a read though sadly it also suffers from being too long IMO.
However, Berniel’s ref to Hulme’s Guardian article is significant. Here, Hulme gives clear evidence of his own false starting point, and I think this is at the heart of the warmists’ ability to adopt BS positions, that is often hidden under their otherwise inexplicable rejections of the sceptics position. Hulme says
Scientific knowledge is modified through its interaction with evidence, not through its interaction with society! This evidential basis needs to be constantly stated in real scientific work, or the author becomes a hypocrite, talking about scientific method but failing at the same time to practice it himself, in the most basic form of checking, and being seen to check, the crucial evidence. Thus the crucial evidence is loudly missing when Hulme simply says in the preceding paragraph
but Hulme has failed badly, and typically for warmists, at this point, because though he TALKS about scientific method, he does not show evidence of PRACTISING it himself ie he parrots the notion that Singer and Avery are “plain wrong” without actually demonstrating their evidence or why he claims it’s wrong.
John Marshall says:
October 23, 2010 at 2:49 am
The weather/climate system is a chaotic one. To model this needs the certain knowledge of all inputs, both magnitude and direction, to get anything like a sane answer. We do not know this system as well as we think we do so our models are wrong.
We know, from the daily weather forecasts, that after only two days there can be great variation between the forecast and actuality. If a three day forecast is a problem then to forecast the next 50/100 years is crass stupidity.
I call it hubris. Hubris is crass stupidity aimed at the gods 🙂 , there is fear of retribution. In the weather/climate case if the next ice age comes sooner than we hope ; it is really just delayed as far as the ice records show and the warming nonsense carries the day, mankind will be found completely unprepared, and that will be the retribution of the gods.
I do not tire of saying that the invention of “climate” as something different than “weather” done in order to deny that climate is chaotic, cannot hold as long as the same differential equations are used as are used in the weather calculations.
And weather iterations hold only for a few days, i.e. a relatively fixed number of iterations. The reason is because programming the solutions of the differential equations requires linearity assumptions that do not exist in the real solutions, thus it is inevitable when non linearities kick in that the programs’ solutions will diverge from the solutions picked by nature , never forget that nature is a huge calculator after all, the only true experiment.
“How do Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority?”
Well, the answer is quite simple really.
The more Complexity they are imbued with , the more a scientifically disconnected public, media & political establishment bestow them with authority, in the mistaken belief that complexity necessarily makes them better.
The rest is about insulating the non-scientific communities from the realities of modelling.
Presentations like this ‘though just serve to bore all but the most ardent of sceptics into submission.
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 23, 2010 at 5:01 am
Quoting Hulme:
” ‘…there are two other characteristics of science that are also important when it comes to deploying its knowledge for the benefit of public policy and society: that scientific knowledge is always provisional knowledge, and that it can be modified through its interaction with society.’ ”
It is rather scientific ignorance that can be manipulated in this way, ostensibly for the benefit of public policy and society of course.
In the video, Prof Hulme reports on his PhD student, Martin Mahoney’s work on PRECIS. This is a Met Office model, distributed to over 100 countries in last 10 years or so. PRECIS seen as effective for ‘raising awareness’. It ‘can make climate change real’. It can ‘attract public endorsements’. It was said by some player that it had been ‘useful to have the UNDP seal of approval on it’. Clearly PRECIS has been found by activists to be useful for ‘convincing policy makers that they should take a stand’.
I added this comment to my report of this on Bishop Hill (http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2010/10/23/shade-on-hulme.html):
‘I suspect the apparent success of PRECIS will one day make a useful study for anthropologists trying to make sense of the late 20th and early 21st century adoration of computer models and the ways in which they seemed to overwhelm policy makers.’
All is not well with our political system when so much is done based on very unsatisfactory computer models. Hopefully this is just a teething problem ‘the system’ will soon grow out of!