While Planet Gore now has the market cornered on entertaining global warming disinformation, Michael Crichton perfected it. For those last two or three people who still think the technothriller writer has his facts straight, check out reasic's terrific post on Crichton's inane 2003 talk, "Aliens Cause Global Warming."
Yes, Crichton, a real medical doctor, actually said:
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
Wow! Not knowing the difference between weather and climate is like not knowing the difference between a general practitioner and an epidemiologist. I don't know what's worse -- the possibility that Crichton is just spouting standard denier crap he knows is crap, or the possibility he actually believes what he is saying.
Kudos to Coby Beck for pointing this post out.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 2:04 am
23 May 2007
It's also the industry that's in the business of understanding future trends, and it's starting to take strong action on climate change.
Ped Shed Blog
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:58 am
23 May 2007
Ok, you say there's a difference in predicting weather (let's limit that to a 3 day forecast) and climate (for the sake of argument, let's define that as the average weather metrics [humidity, temperature, cloudiness] over a three year period.
Several questions:
There are sites like weather.com and wunderderground.com that show the 3 day weather. Is there a "climate.com" where I can get the 3 day climate for my zipcode?
It would seem that the stock market should have as many factors in it as weather/climate. Therefore, I would expect that over a three year period, the engineers would have developed models that generally predict the behavior of the long term market (climate).
Well, so far they've failed miserably, and people who throw darts at boards often beat the models hands down.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:59 am
23 May 2007
I can get the 3 day climate for my zipcode?
make that:
get the 3 YEAR climate for my zipcode.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:37 am
23 May 2007
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:32 am
23 May 2007
...brie gobbling Eurocrats and a twice defeated Presidential hopeful setting American taxation and economic policy?
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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ngoddard Posted 5:49 am
23 May 2007
Not much of a market for climate prediction by zipcode - so the market doesn't provide it.
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blueberrysushi Posted 6:35 am
23 May 2007
Climate models look at large-scale spatial (as well as temporal) phenomena. The ones I've looked at have very coarse scale predictions and so it would be useless to ask for your zip code. Most also have multiple projections, depending on the variables used, because of stochasticity.
Models are, by definition, simplifications of the world. In order to make predictions, we simplify the world. I am not aware of any other way to make predictions quantitatively. Of course we can do experiments, but these don't predict the future, the data they generate are used to fill in gaps in the models. But until we have perfect knowledge, we will not have perfect models.
As to the stock market: an economist here said that he predicted rational behavior, but that people rarely acted rationally. If the stock market responded to the actions of millions (billions) of rational humans, then it would be more predictable. It doesn't, and so economists' predictions are often imprecise or inaccurate (the fact that they are so often static doesn't help).
The climate is similar. I haven't heard anyone say that they have a bullet-proof model of future climate, and there are climatologists here, too (at this research university/federal agency research lab). Stochasticity happens, as they say. But when predictions are matching empirical evidence, as has happened, and the predictions are between gloom and ubergloom, then it may be wise to start planning for the inevitable.
As for the title: I have my own problems with models, so I can't believe I'm defending their veracity. But models are what we (as scientists, as a society) use to predict the future. They are the application of empirical data to a predictive question. My work is strictly descriptive, rather than predictive, and so I look suspiciously at these model things. But, man, sometimes you can't ignore the mountains of evidence.
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greenthinker Posted 6:39 am
23 May 2007
To have the information you request would be nice, but that just isn't the resolution at which those models work. To ask you question of them is like asking a screwdiver to hammer in a nail.
Jay Odenbaugh
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Delay And Deny Posted 8:02 am
23 May 2007
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070528&s= ...
Even "The Nation" is getting wise:
The foot soldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by devotees of the fearmongers' catechism. The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.
To identify either government-funded climate modelers or their political shock troops at the IPCC with scientific objectivity is as unrealistic as detecting the same in a craniologist financed by Lombroso studying a murderer's head in a nineteenth-century prison. The craniologist's calipers were adjusted by the usual incentives of stipends and professional ego to find in the skull of that murderer ridges, bumps and depressions, each meticulously equated with an ungovernable passion or a mental derangement.
At least Lombroso and his retinue measured heads. All Al Gore has ever needed is a hot day or some heavy rain as opportunity to promote the unassailable theory of man-made global warming. Come a rainy summer (1995) or a routine El Niño (1997) and Gore is there for the photo op, his uplifted finger warning of worse to come
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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tico89 Posted 2:13 pm
23 May 2007
I mean, personally, given a choice between the two I would trust Gore more (I was always taught to check my facts, something Crichton clearly doesn't do, as evinced by his awarding of an air force to Costa Rica, a country that doesn't actually have any armed forces); but surely this argument is bigger than just a couple of personalities?
Or is it?
If I share initials with 'Global Warming', is that a sign?
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GRLCowan Posted 7:39 am
24 May 2007
I recall my annoyance when one of Crichton's tame scientists remarked, in Jurassic Park (the book) I believe it was, that science could tell us how to build a nuclear reactor, but not give us the wisdom not to do it. Instantly I surmised, as is my habit since I tend to believe no-one is ever antinuclear except for money he or she could not earn honestly, that the puppeteer was a petrolista.
So his recent AGW position was no surprise.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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