Comments Ciani has made

  • The chaos guy is correct!

    The chaos guy is absolutely correct, and moroever, the response he received is very weak because there is no prohibition against chaotic systems producing regular cycles; the question is whether or not those cycles are PREDICTABLE from the onset.  

    If a system is truly chaotic, however, that doesn't mean that once the system has run you can't look backward and discover patterns that have emerged. Clearly climate works this way.

    [quote]"So what?  On timescales that matter, decades to centuries, all the evidence points to a system that is responsive in a generally predictable way to many kinds of forcings, including enhancing the greenhouse effect."[/quote]

    Huh? What evidence points to this? If all evidence points to this, one would think they'd have actually made an ACCURATE prediction.  

    If anything the evidence points the OPPOSITE way! This is just another gross assumption that is totally unfounded--what evidence points to us being able to predict the climate 100 years from now?  

    Also note the reliance on some arbitrary notion of "timescales that matter"? What does that even mean? Matter to who? Equations don't care about timescales, General Relativity runs forward and backward in time from milliseconds to billions of years with the same effectiveness.  

    If a system is predictable 100 years from now, it should be just as easily predictable a thousand years from now, no? The only situation wherein it wouldn't be is if we couldn't trust the 100 predictions, and that's exactly where we are at now!

    [quote]"So, predicting how he'll play tomorrow is difficult. Though you can try looking at his fitness levels etc. Predicting how he'll be over the complete season is easier because you can look at his last five seasons or so... "[/quote]

    This is absurd. He is revealing the weakness of his own argument with this analogy. Any future baseball prediction is going to be nothing more than an educated guess. Yes, we can increase that accuracy of that guess by taking into account past performance, but--average or no--there is no reliable mathematical way to predict the future performance of a player, exactly as there is no reliable mathematical way to predict the future of the climate.

    This guy is essentially saying that climate scientists are fortune tellers that rely on past data to guess the future. So what? That's not science, it's gambling.

    --Ciani
    On 'We can't even predict the weather next week'--But weather is not climate posted 2 years, 4 months ago 11 Responses

  • Predicting the weather next week

    The unfounded assumptions in these statements is absolutely astounding.  

    First, how do we know that climate is really just a simple process of averaging weather over 30 years? If that was the case, how do they account for huge shifts in climate like ice-ages? As it is highly unlikely that any thirty year period is going to point to most of North America covered with a sheet of ice, clearly there are factors in play beyond merely averaging conditions.

    What this ultimately comes down to is the glaring, always unmentioned hole in climate science:  

    **No one has ever established that future climate is predictable with any degree of accuracy beyond random chance.

    To use the baseball player analogy (predicting what a good player is likely to do over the course of a season versus any given day) there is no mathematical formula to predict what a player will do in any given year even with absolute knowledge of past results and conditions at the start of the season. You can weigh those factors and make an educated guess that increases your CHANCE of making an accurate prediction, but ultimately you are still playing with CHANCE, not actually predicting future behavior like you would with some hypothetical General Theory of Baseball.

    Climate "science" works the same way. They haven't demonstrated that the climate is predictable on any scale, and yet they insist it is.  

    To follow the baseball analogy to it's logical end, it's quite likely (in my opinion) that future climate isn't predictable exactly as future stats aren't. The underlying reason is ultimately the same: there are far too many variables in play for the system to be accurately "modelled" (even in principle) and ultimately you are forced to work from gross assumptions and estimations.

    --CianiOn 'We can't even predict the weather next week'--But weather is not climate posted 2 years, 4 months ago 11 Responses

  • Regarding the evidence

    *"Global warming is not an output of computer models; it is a conclusion based on observations of a great many global indicators."

    Well, if models aren't being used to predict future temperatures, then how are they coming up with these future projections some 100 years down the road?

    More importantly, what are the exact variables that go into these observations/projections? It seems there's always some mystery regarding the exact input being used to determine future climate.

    What are these variables? And how are these variables being modeled?

    I'd actually be curious to see what equations are being used to arrive at some of these conclusions (which, incidentally, are constantly being altered as evidenced by the latest from the IPCC when they reduced projections from previous reports).

    If the conclusions are based on "observations of a great many global indicators", then surely, these indicators must be sorted into an equation that attempts to ultimately model the climate (despite contradictory claims that there is no modeling).

    **"By far the most straightforward evidence is the actual surface temperature record. While there are places -- in England, for example -- that have records going back several centuries, the two major global temperature analyses can only go back around 150 years due to their requirements for both quantity and distribution of temperature recording stations."

    Can the global temperature analyses even accurately assess past temperatures from 150 years ago?

    How much am I supposed to trust the measurements and record keeping of arctic ice cap temperatures from 100 years ago, or whatever exactly is supposed to be the basis of these claims?

    For starters, this is a comparison between satellite data and mercury thermometer readings. Couldn't the supposed temperature differences be at least partially the product of calibration errors, different methodologies, or simply an inherent lack of prcision in the earlier data due to less sophisticated instruments?

    I look forward to some answers to these questions.

    Many thanks!

    --CianiOn 'There is no evidence' -- Yes, there is posted 2 years, 6 months ago 59 Responses