Bastardi's Wager 672
DesScorp writes "AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi has a challenge for climate scientists. He wants one or more of their rank to accept a bet about temperature trends in the coming decade. Bastardi is making specific predictions. 'The scientific approach is: you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,' he says. 'That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.' Bastardi's challenge to his critics — who are legion — is to make their own predictions. And then wait. Climate science, he adds, 'is just a big weather forecast.' Bastardi's challenge is reminiscent of the famous Simon-Ehrlich Wager, where the two men made specific predictions about resource scarcity in the '80s."
And For The Record... (Score:5, Informative)
For the record, meteorologists are not climatologists. This is little different than engineers imagining themselves as physicists.
Once again, climate != weather (Score:5, Informative)
So this is a meteorologist who studies short-term phenomena claiming to be better at short-term prediction than people who study long-term phenomena. Wowee, zip de-doo. If a climatologist accepts his bet and loses, what does it prove? That a climatologist isn't a meteorologist, and I think we knew that already.
Re:Once again, climate != weather (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with some of what he says (Score:5, Informative)
I like how Bastardi is not grinding any political axes. What he says sounds logical. If you look at the wikipedia entry on him there's mention (but no link) of Bastardi's long-range forecast for this winter, that was released by AccuWeather last October. It has already been shown to be very far off the mark of what has happened the last couple of months. So this guy's track record isn't any better than any other "weather man".
AccuWeather isn't above trying to aggrandize themselves, either. They tried to get the government to close down the National Weather Service and halt the distribution of weather satellite data to the public a few years ago.
Climate science is just a big weather forecast... (Score:4, Informative)
Article doesn't live up to expectations (Score:5, Informative)
Showmanship is fine. After all, the Randi foundation has used the showmanship of its million dollar prize for a while now to punch holes into all kinds of quackery. But as I read through Bastardi's claims and comments, I was disappointed to see nothing new and some pretty standard failings.
“The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says this is the warmest decade ever — well, that’s like you wake up every morning and weigh 175 pounds, and one morning you wake up and are 175.1.”
No, it's more like weighing 175 lbs in the last decade, and then discovering that your average in the current decade has been 176. And that your weight has been increasing for the last 5 decades.
We started using objective satellite data in 1978.
He must have missed all the commotion about satellite data that revolved around what satellites are measuring, how they're measuring it and how their data fits into all the other data that's been collected. Specifically: a temperature station on the ground that produces a different reading than that of a satellite looking at infrared emission for that geographic area isn't (necessarily) wrong. It is measuring something completely different, and merging the two is hard.
Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, a tiny gas, part of this huge system. You’re trying to tell me that’s going to control the system and influence the energy of the system? When you have things like the sun, which is obviously the greatest contributor to the world’s energy? It almost defies common sense.
I started to lose confidence at this point. It's a standard argument from incredulity: I don't understand this, therefore it can't be true. He also confuses what's causing global warming: it's not only the energy input that controls how much warming occurs, but also how much energy is lost to space. And the problem that everyone's been talking about is that less energy is lost to space than before.
CO2 is still increasing, and the overall temperature has leveled off.
Because CO2 isn't the only thing that controls the Earth's temperature. If he had actually read the research and would understand climate science, he'd know that, and he'd know that this bit of info is widely known. My personal prediction 5 years ago was that we'd be getting back to a regular warming schedule in the next 1-3 years, based on nothing else than knowing that the sun was entering a quiet period then.
That’s not how the atmosphere works — for every step it takes away from the norm, the more likely it is to turn back
I don't know if he was misquoted, but that's not how the atmosphere works. There is nothing in the atmospheric cycle that regulates CO2 movement. Oceans absorb CO2, plants consume it, but that's not the atmosphere. Finally, he is not providing any numbers for his belief that the atmospheric CO2 content is controlled by negative feedback loops. Historic data on CO2 concentrations would actually indicate the opposite - that there can be wild fluctuations.
Fifth, today’s weather exhibits no unique patterns that require a unique explanation. They’re nothing we haven’t seen before
Now we're getting into weather. If he's going to lecture people on climate patterns and predictions, he should stay on topic.
And that’s just Bastardi’s point. It’s disingenuous to say we have conclusive proof of the future of such a torturously complicated system.
Ok, not something he said, but still - another lame argument from incredulity. There's plenty of complex systems out there, and many have been understood - just not by everybody.
Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He
Re:Whatever you think of it (Score:5, Informative)
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
Here is the article from which that was taken: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html [independent.co.uk]
Re:Average Temperature (Score:5, Informative)
They don't take an average absolute temperature, but an average temperature anomaly, which makes a lot more sense. At each station, they measure the temperature difference between the current temperature, and a 30-year base period. Research has shown there's a good correlation between anomalies of different measuring stations, even if separated by hundreds of miles, even though the absolute temperatures between those same stations could differ by ten degrees or more.
See here for more info:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1987/Hansen_Lebedeff.html [nasa.gov]
Re:real science (Score:4, Informative)
Climate science no more works that way than statistics predicts the results of individual coin flips.
Trend lines? Sure. But if Bastardi has genuine complaints about the trend lines being inaccurate, the statistical models, the correlation of A and B, he could do exactly what any other scientists does - make a genuine experiment debunking the current set.
But since actual temperatures fall squarely in the middle between the best and worst case scenarios predicted some 30 years ago now, he's decided he wants to run with a PR stunt with the predictable result that during the 7 years he's wrong will never be mentioned in conservative circles, but the two or three years that are below average in Lake CuCooLander will be trumpeted 24/7 as a complete debunking of climate science - and never mentioned again when it regresses to the mean.
Golly Gee Willikers I would love to, but it seems I'm going to be busy hitting my head against the wall for the next decade.
Pug
Joe Bastardi isn't "oil backed" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Keep drinking the coolaid (Score:3, Informative)
Here [realclimate.org], knock yourself out.
Re:real science (Score:4, Informative)
No, it doesn't say that at all. Statistics of a fair coin flip say that you might get 0, 5, 10, or any integer number in between, heads. It tells you that you're more likely to get 5 (probability 0.24609, if my math is right) than 0 or 10 (probability .00097 each), but it does not rule out 0 or 10.
I make the probability of getting 4, 5, or 6 heads on 10 coin flips to be 0.64648. If I bet you that there will be 4, 5, or 6 heads, and in fact there are some other number, does that mean my theory was wrong? Nope.
Similarly, climate modeling tells us that we are more likely to have a warming trend over the next decade. It does not rule out cooling -- due to, say, a volcanic eruption, or a decrease in insolation, or some other factor unrelated to greenhouse gasses and urban heat islands temporarily overwhelming the warming trend. (Or due to some brilliant new technology that extracts huge amounts of CO2 and methane from the air, or some massive change in human behavior.)
Re:real science (Score:4, Informative)
Luckily NASA has already performed that experiment. Peter Sinclair created a youtube video detailing the experiment and the results [youtube.com] (results appear ~5:10 mark). Apparently this contra-evidence annoyed Watts so much that he filed a false DCMA notice against it [desmogblog.com].
In other words if you don't like frauds, you should not be using Anthony Watts as a source.