Roger L. Simon: Climate Change - the real 57-variety pop quiz

Barack Obama had his junior "senior moment" the other day, mixing up our 50 states with varieties of Heinz ketchup (Freudian slip?). Marc Ambinder is correct when he notes that the media would have been all over this had McCain made this gaffe.

But if you want to see some real gaffes, as opposed to the normal fatigue-induced version above, ask any of the candidates a serious scientific question about climate change, even though they all seem to have an opinion about it. Now I went to the same Ivy League schools most of them did and did considerably better academically than George W. Bush, John Kerry and Al Gore (It wasn't that hard, I might add. I wasn't exceptional). But I couldn't answer those questions with authority. I know this all the more from just having finished Climate Confusion by former NASA scientist Roy Spencer. Climatology is complicated stuff. Not for beginners. I wonder if any of our politicians could really understand it after reading the book. Yet they have assured opinions on the subject. Lucky for them the media is equally uneducated. They wouldn't even know how to pose the questions.

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Stuff like how many states there are is generally part of the grade school curriculum, but maybe not in Indonesia.

He visited a few territories recently, like Guam. I don't doubt that caused the confusion. Still as a candidate he should know better.

There's a new 'study' out from some UN agency or other, which projects that for the next ten years we'll not see much global warming. I was reminded of this by a physics professor at the University of Washington, who serenely continues in his faith that humans must be restricted before their economic activity (uh, not that of the Indians and Chinese, of course) damages the earth beyond belief.

Oh, yeah? The entire religion of global warming is based on the computer-generated 'projections' of the last couple of decades, NONE of which project the current temperature dip which the UN 'scientists' have just admitted.

So are they lying now, or were they lying then? And why should anyone believe a gang of politicized 'scientists' whose grants depend on their allegiance to the GW cult?

No wonder the GW fundamentalists have switched to 'climate change' as their new mantra for The Sky Is Falling. They can demand new powers and funding for themselves, and new prohibitions and restrictions on the rest of the citizenry, every time the weather changes.

There was a low-budget sci-fi movie back in the early 60s called Unearthly Stranger. College professor (John Neville) is driving through a deserted area late one night and comes upon a young woman (Gabriella Licudi) walking by the side of the road. She can't seem to explain herself very well, but she's a babe and so who cares, right? After a while they get married and everything is great, till one evening he walks by the kitchen door and sees her take a piping hot casserole out of the oven -- barehanded, without oven mitts. Whoa!!

"In celebration of his having traveled to an impressive 57 states in his bid for the Presidency (and to finally put to rest the notion that he abhors patriotic accessories), Barack Obama's campaign has introduced a custom line of American flag lapel pins."

"I wonder if any of our politicians could really understand it after reading the book."

Most of them probably couldn't understand the book to begin with (and maybe I couldn't, either; I studied foreign languages).

But I have a knee-jerk suspicion of any issue that comes with recommendations for more and bigger government as a solution.

I remember in 2000 how much the MSM made of Bush not knowing the name of Pakistan's Musharaff.

This is from the folks at the great www.artsandlettersdaily.com site. Two running columns, updating as news comes in, on the pros (one column) and the cons (the other column) of the climate debate.

My knowledge concerning per se climate change is very limited. But I do know this: you are listening to fool if they claim to be able to accurately predict temperatures in the distant future. Please note the difficulties of the weather professionals to predict the temperature for even the following week! This is the number reason why I laugh at the global warming fanatics.

I don't know climatology worth a damn. About at the level of "Summer is warmer than winter".

But, I do know something about statistics and computer modeling. Given what I know I do not believe that the models being used for all these dire predictions hold any more water than a sieve.

Check out http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3048
to see some scientific discussion of the topic.

Until the warmenists can provide a model that accurately predicts today from the past data (heck predicts today from today's data) they are just blowing smoke saying that they can accurately predict fractional degree changes 50 to a hundred years out.

When the Democrats take over we will no longer have to worry about global warming.

It's true! It's true! The Democrats have made it clear.
The climate must be perfect all the year.

A law will be made in Congress that:
July and August cannot be too hot.
And there will be a legal limit to the snow here
With Democrats.
The winter is forbidden till December
And exits March the second on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through September
With Democrats.
Democrats! Democrats!
I know it sounds a bit bizarre,
But With Democrats, Democrats
That's how conditions are.
The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
With Democrats.

Democrats! Democrats!
I know it gives a person pause,
But With Democrats, Democrats
Those will be the legal laws.
The snow may never slush upon the hillside.
By nine p.m. the moonlight must appear.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
With Democrats.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book early on is the graph he introduces which shows that the "greenhouse effect" even without the additional CO2 we have added since the onset of the fossil fuel age strives, as it were, to raise the air temperature near earth's surface to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and then he proceeds to show how the weather, which can be thought of as a kind of heat engine whose work is to move heat from where it is in excess to where it is relatively deficient, cools things off and carries the excess heat back into out space, ultimately by re-radiating it.

He then proceeds to show what a minuscule effect, in view of all this, the relatively tiny amount of carbon man has introduced into the atmosphere is likely to have.

haha -- nationalize the economy on Monday, and announce on Tuesday that it worked, it's back to just plain old weather now.

I've worked in Modeling and Simulation for many years (not climatology) and I have constant arguments with the uninformed. In particular, I dispute the "its worse than predicted!!!" argument. The basic fact is: if your model is wrong, its wrong. It means you have a bad model, not that you can interpret wrong results into something else. As Yoda would say, there is "no worse than predicted" there is only a good model or a bad model. Retroactive prediction should be left to psychics and numerologists.

I work with relatively simple things - rockets, satellites, communications - and these follow pretty simply rules - thrust, flyouts, ballistic trajectories, gravity, atmosphere attenuation, etc. And even straightforward stuff like this is very hard to do accurately. Especially the weather related problems dealing with cloud cover, storms, plumes and the like.

I admire their efforts, but the M&S guys just aren't there yet. Its a tough problem and I think weather prediction is just too hard to do right now. Anyone who has dealt with the short term forecast errors (even for a snowstorm) can understand this.

Whenever science gets politicized, we all lose. Politics is irrational, science is rational; when you have uninformed talking heads making laughably unscientific statements, all is lost.

PE, I did biomedical simulations (you want excitement, simulate hundreds of thousands of cells that really are cells) and I agree with you, in general: these things are complicated enough that any modeling has to be suspect, and all modeling tends to predict exactly what the modeler's hypothesis would suggest.

IS, in a word, no. They weren't lying then, they aren't lying now. They might be wrong, but I know some of these folks, and they're quite sincere. Compare this to the "Bush lied" people: you're making the same mistake.

David, you're making a very poor comparison here. Compare it to the stock market: nobody's model can predict the exact value of the IDIX on the 30th June 2012; you can still predict with great confidence that the market will gain on average something over 10 percent per year over a span of 20 or 30 years. When someone uses a climate model to predict average temp gains, they're predicting the long term smoothed trend of a complicated process, not the day to day details.

Charlie's got another box of carbon credits printed up. Noon break, back parking lot, Buick.

May 10, 2008: Climate Change - the real 57-variety pop quiz

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