From “the stupid, it burns” department. Earlier this week, WUWT carried a story about why we should trust climate scientists – because science is able to predict the eclipse years ahead.
Never mind the fact that orbital mechanics is a precise calculation with essentially zero uncertainty, because the motions, masses, and speeds of bodies in the solar system aren’t fraught with the chaos and uncertainty that we see in the weather and climate system. Nooooo, let’s ignore the “uncertainty monster” and pretend that climate prediction is as certain as orbital mechanics.
Along those lines, Neil DeGrasse Tyson beclowned himself today:
Neil of course doesn’t seem to understand that the National Hurricane Center has operational meteorologists, not climate scientists. But when you believe weather is climate, I guess anything goes.
Sheesh. Pretty soon he’s going to outshine Bill Nye in the science stupidity category.
It’s only idiots who think people like de Grasse and the other clown with the bow tie, whose name escapes me, have anything meaningful to say.
jimmy. Is it an unwritten rule that when a scientist becomes a darling of the left he becomes incompetent and silly in his inability to comprehend science? Or do those type of people who are left and admired by leftists start out silly?
The problem with Climate Scientists is:
You must first eliminate all those that are Right
and the remainder is those who are Left
I think it’s more of the latter. Only clowns would allow themselves to be used as entertainment to the point of loosing essentially all objectivity and self respect.
I must urge you to consider the career path of Andrew Weaver. If a scientist ( climate modeller in this case ) becomes a politician, does that not mean he forfeits scientific credibility and is now into the realm of advocacy? Call me crazy, but,…..
Andrew Weaver is really mad that the government he put into power is removing bridge tolls :
http://www.bcgreens.ca/weaver_statement_on_government_s_decision_to_remove_bridge_tolls
The clown Bill Nye with the tie is suing Disney for nine million dollars.
His boss was Mickey Mouse. I predict a 9 year old claim will be hard to win.
That’s what happens Bill when you believe the numbers handed to you by other people and don’t actually have a clue about what they really are. Maybe he’ll sue Mickey Mann after he sues Mickey Mouse.
Bill Nye the science lye is a TV clown, mad scientist.
Children under the age of five find he very funny, I’m told.
It’s a time honored way to make money in the US. Sue people and get a huge settlement. Drug companies, oil companies, etc. are ideal targets. Bill is just profiting the American way.
This says he’s suing for $37 MM: http://pagesix.com/2017/08/25/bill-nye-hits-disney-with-37m-lawsuit-suit-over-science-guy-profits/
Knowing what I know about entertainment industry creative accounting,’ I hope old Bill Nye wins. Clowns deserve to be paid, too.
I have a theory about these sort of high IQ people. High IQ comes with additional risk of that intelligence being narrow banded so we end up with the ‘Rain Man’ syndrome in some of them. In this case the narrow bandedness is all concentrated around the self. It is also known as narcissism. I think there is a lot of it about especially in certain commuities. In times past such communities might be a royal or imperial court say, Versailles perhaps being an exemplar.
These days I think it is mainly due to the ubiquity and sheer volume of the visual image forming a virtual hall of mirrors out of everywhere and everything. The internet doesn’t help in that respect.
All in all its a bit like Thalidomide, used to address nausea and other symptoms of morning sickness (as an over the counter would you believe) but those old unintended consequences became a real nuisance….and are malforming and distorting the public discourse on matters of substance.
He is a pompous ass, who makes himself credible by linking himself to Carl Sagan, he apparently met Carl once, but he makes it seem like they were best buds. Of course he is half black and rides the global warming wave, so of course gets lots of money. Of course if Carl were alive he would call this douche bag out!
False. He said nothing of the kind. http://observer.com/2015/12/neil-degrasse-tyson-carl-sagan-altered-my-trajectory/
Someone should award Puff de Grasse a bow tie. They’re about on the same plane.
Michael Mann wears a bow tie?
My old shop teacher said shop teachers (and engineers) wear bow ties so they don’t get their ties wrapped around the axle. Apparently that can happen to bow ties, too.
I predict that the US will experience hurricanes.
YOU need Big grant money…your bang on!! 🙂
Only if you say they are caused by Global Warming…….
When it suits the narrative, it’s climate; when it doesn’t, it’s weather. “Climate” is becoming an increasingly malleable, slippery concept.
In the beginning, when it was full on GLOBAL WARMING, the narrative from the Warm Alarmists was that you cannot conflate weather with climate. Oh what a tangled web they weaved.
I think anyone less than 150 years old has no concept of climate, just foggy memories of the observance of weather.
“wove”?
Speaking of eclipses, here’s some pictures/video from Tryon, Nebraska
http://www.komar.org/faq/2017_solar_eclipse_tryon_nebraska/
It was pretty darn cool to experience in person – highly recommend those who haven’t try to attend one in real-life.
Thanks for posting. Great photos and video–not sure I can see the shadow bands. I had a good view of totality from Bowling Green, Kentucky. I was surprised at the number of sunspots (given the recent frequent ‘blank sun” solar minimum days) visible with my Coronado PST. Crash course in using my Canon Rebel T2i; now its Lightroom and figuring out the HDR bracketing merge, etc.
….or it can just as easily go the other way too
When they have the cone of death from Rio to Maine
Of course we can predict eclipses! It’s all to do with gravity. Unfortunately the surface temperature of the earth has NOTHING to do with gravity AT ALL, just like all the other rocky planets or moons with gaseous atmospheres. No, the fact that all Earth’s atmospheric molecules are in a strong gravitational field has absolutely nothing to do with temperature on the surface of the planet, gravity does nothing here (apart from the lapse rate of course but that’s not really primarily about temperature more to do with pressure and density).
Neil De Who?
Sorry, I’m a Brit, we have our own whacko’s who like to conflate weather with climate.
Like the BBC.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is PBS’ current favorite talking head on “science”, which is whatever politics PBS wants to push.
Tyson makes a habit of making a twit of himself. Here is one he made soon after Trump was elected
Accurate comment. Two point penalty, however, for improper apostrophe use and failure to use a (.) period.
This is why I don’t do Twitter. I got no sense at all from the three comments in the head post.
There is something to be said for people like Tyson, who is incapable of experiencing embarrassment.
Not something nice, mind you.
That’s a job requirement for persistent trolls too.
You can put up with quite a bit when you are paid to do so.
The thing with weather is that we can mostly see it coming. That’s been the case since the invention of the telegraph. If it was raining cats and dogs in Podunky Hills, it was a near certainty that there would be a downpour in Skunk Mills twenty minutes later. link Long term forecasting, on the other hand, hasn’t improved much since Ben Franklin’s day. link
commieBob,
And, there is a geostationary weather satellite in orbit taking pictures of storms as they progress. On the other hand, climate is an abstraction that cannot be imaged directly. Climate has to be inferred from a complex assortment of sometimes conflicting and always uncertain information. It is disappointing that Tyson doesn’t seem to understand that!
Tyson only understands that running his mouth gets him attention and increases his income. Just like Mike Tyson, huh.
Look at 15 days ago, and see who thought it would be a cat3 storm and hit where it did. Look at the spaghetti map from that time – looks like the climate models – all over the map, literally. If prediction was so good, why are hurricane hunters in the sky constantly to update the data on the storm? Without those, there would be no prediction. Fools and Idiots.
Would anyone ride airplanes if the landings were as unpredictable as the weather 15 days out?
makes sense
Landings are much more predictable now that I’ve retired.
I remember when I used think that people with PhDs were incredibly smart and perceptive… then I got one myself and started working with some that were, well, not so smart and perceptive.
DeGrasse Tyson is an entertainer. He should stick to narrating programs at the Hayden Planetarium.
Actually all PhDs are smart but you have to be within the beam width to see it. If you are on a side lobe of one of the high gain versions the phase distortion makes them look like idiots. And the nulls are something else! Finding the few with a more omnidirectional intelligence is tricky. Feynmann wasn’t even a dipole. Hawking has a shorted feeder.
RB: Nice antenna-humor!! And applicable to a fair number of Nobel prize winners who, despite their brilliance in one particular direction, had little to offer in other areas of science, let alone public policy.
Book smart, many of them. But logic? Not so much.
I’ve run into many,many professional engineers with that exact problem.
Tyson suffers from the fact that his job depends on him making politically correct statements. He gave up science some time ago in favor of celebrity.
Like the US govt, it is often hard to tell if they are incompetent or stupid. But, I then embrace the healing power of “and”. This is actually accurate, because only a corrupt organization promotes and retains incompetents.
So true.
The easiest way to get rid of your incompetents in an organization in which firing is practically impossible is to promote them into somebody else’s department.
The Peter Principle!
Incompetent entry-level employees that for whatever reason aren’t easily fired will often be “kicked upstairs” to management, in order to minimize the mayhem they cause. An underlying cause for why managers so often seem less than useless.
Please don’t forget the Inverse Peter Principle. It takes effect after the Peter Principle has run its course. Once someone has reached his level of incompetence he is then promoted to a position where his incompetence is no long as obvious. That explains the upper level management in several organizations I worked with (consulting) and for (employee).
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a leftist loon who spends half his time appearing on either the leftard Bill Maher’s show or the leftards of MS-NBC.
Just as well, if he joined the Black Panthers he’s big enough to be dangerous.
He has to say “climate scientists” because everyone on his side of the debate has made public statements of one sort or another degrading “meteorologists”.
He’s such a tool.
It seems to me that the argument that science can predict eclipses therefore climate science makes totally accurate predictions too, is a gift to the sceptic side because it is so easy to debunk. Debunking it with ease is a win on its own, but it then follows that the alarmists are actually prepared to use any argument, no matter how weak, to promote their cause. Surely they have some better ones that they could use instead, otherwise why use this one?
It truly is all they’ve got. AGW “science” is that bad.
So, Mr. Kneel in the Grass, equates predicting the trajectory of celestial objects with predicting the actions of a chaotic system.
I guess he’s just way smarter than a laymen like myself, cuz it sounds like standardized opportunistic BS to me.
Hmm, don’t see many climate models which predicted hurricane Harvey.
Strange that because all climate models predicted the last solar eclipse.
How many climate models predicted the crash of N. Atl. accumulated cyclone energy since 2005 ?
Looks like the infrasound issue has finally made headlines.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-25/mystery-deepens-after-us-confirms-16-diplomats-suffered-traumatic-brain-injury-cuban
Now is the time for people to bring up the wind turbine infrasound issue.
I wouldn’t want to live near wind turbines because of the insidious infrasound.
I did so on my blog yesterday and in several comment sections of news articles.
A metaphor:
Weather Forecasting
(youtube)
Climate “Projections”
(and, yes, I realize that climate is even more chaotic and less predictable than predicting the position of each marble at a given time — it is only an analogous metaphor)
(youtube)
Wrong analogy. Climatology would be predicting average time for a marble to descend the run … without knowing the size , number and position of the obstacles.
Greg. I see your point, which is a good one. HOWEVER (ahem), an analogy need not be perfect to be useful and not “wrong.” (Doyourealizehowharditistofindgoodvideostomakeapoint??????)
A comparison is to communicate or illustrate a point. It is not proof of the point being communicated.
A flaw in the analogy does not disprove the point.
The being, these guys have a few loose marbles. 😎
Mods! Help!
“The being, these guys have a few loose marbles”.
Should be”
The POINTbeing, these guys have a few loose marbles. 😎
The eclipse was predicted from our understanding of the Theory of Gravity.
Theory of Gravity vs Theory of Climate Change
While we still do not fully understand how Gravity works, humans have quantified how it behaves with such precision that we can predict eclipses with great accuracy and we knew that the planet Neptune existed before it was ever seen. We’ve developed applicable scientific Laws that allow us to apply them and make these predictions.
With the Theory of Climate Change, we have elaborate descriptions of how it works, but we are incapable of quantifying it. Since we can’t quantify anything we’re unable to produce any science to apply, and we’re left with a vacuous theory. If we had any science to apply, we could easily determine the amount and duration of heat being trapped on Mars with its 95% CO2 atmosphere. It must resolve to something and yet we can’t even derive an equation.
There is NO “Theory of Climate Change”
True. There is not even a testable hypothesis of “climate change” (note: this term as commonly used means human-induced climate change; we all know, seaice, et al., that climate changes).
Greg,
There isn’t even a Hypothesis of Climate Change in any concise sense.
We know ‘things’ that affect climate.
CO2 is in there – probably at about 94th place. I think WUWT had a long post on the other 94 or 95. Can’t find it – I thought I had bookmarked it.
It is a chaotic system, as noted above, and so – today – we have not got a clue about where it will be in – say – twenty years.
Me – I hope it is a bit warmer.
I fear it might be a bit cooler; if so, poor folk in even countries like the UK will die from “eat or heat” dilemmas.
Auto
You are too gracious when you say “Theory of Climate Change.” It is barely an hypothesis. Once you have enough observations to develop the hypothesis, you test the hypothesis. If your testing reveals that the hypothesis has useful predictive ability, then you can start building your theory. So far, no gots.
You don’t need to understand gravity to predict an eclipse. Thales did it about 585 B.C. A record of observations appears to be sufficient.
Heck, the Egyptians, Babylonians, Sumerian… predicted eclipses.
http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/1.808116
Like climate scientists today, the prophets and heads of state used them to terrorize their citizens if the didn’t obey or pay homage. I’m surprised
a) prescient climate scientists like Neil was taken by surprise by the he eclipse
b) Al Gore didn’t use this harbinger of bad times a head in promoting his climate port show.
Hurricane path prediction is notoriously bad. Can’t believe we have a poor rebuttle to an outlandish proposition.
Actually, m2, path prediction has gotten pretty good couple of days out. Cone of uncertainty has shrunk by well more than half since I moved to South Florida. Its intensity where the NHC predictions are still dicey.
So far, Joe B seems close, but we’ll see….Be a blessing if he is wrong of course. Like his use of antecedents.
Agreed. And worth pointing out that the improvements have as much to do with better data (vertically resolved pressure gradients, etc) as with better modeling. Which highlights perhaps the biggest practical difference between climate science and hurricane/weather prediction. For any given predictive period (say, 5 to 10 days for a tropical storm track) the instrumentation doesn’t change and we can at least trust the repeatability of the measurement. For models built on past measurements and hind casting, one is dealing with instruments and measurements that are changing over time. Which leaves far too much latitude to the ‘scientists’ who are tempted to ‘correct’ past instrumental records to match the expected behavior.
A while back, an animal rights campaigner said that since we have climate models that are so accurate, we should just make a computer model of the human body and use that for medical experimentation and not experiment on animals. Nobody took him seriously. He was a nut job. So, about this Neal guy, what does he do for a living again?