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."
Flatlander (Score:3, Interesting)
Another weatherman who thinks what he's doing is climatology. He's a little like a 2D character in Flatland that doesn't understand 3D. I hope someone takes him up on his wager, as long as there's a disinterested 3rd party to judge the result and hold the cash.
Re:I am confident this thread won't become a flame (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.html [noaa.gov]
I like to go where the science is being done, rather than the claims from either side on what I should think based on a dare, er, I mean bet. Not a dare, a bet. That's so much more scientific. ;)
Lose / Lose Wager (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't a wager normally involve an ante?
If Bastardi wins the wager what does he gain, karma points? There will be big wins all around for individuals, businesses and governments.
If Bastardi loses the wager he loses what? It appears if we wait and Bastardi turns out to be wrong we will be behind by one more decade on addressing the issue and a heavy price will be paid by everyone.
And while he has some valuable points as far as the accuracy of climatologists making predictions his analogies seem a bit off.
He claims they are using recent trends but does not define "recent" while the trends I have seen go back several decades or centuries. In geologic time centuries are recent trends but is this what he means? I suspect not because then he questions the use of data in longer trends.
And in another analogy he compares a 0.06% change in your weight form 175.0 lbs to 175.1 lbs over a decade to a 0.6% increase in global temperature from the mean of around 57.563 F to 57.923 F. While the increase in temperature over a decade doesn't look significant his comparison is off by an order of magnitude and that is ignoring the irrational comparison of the complexities of an individuals body weight to that of global temperatures.
Anyhow, it is good to bring up questions but this wager and some of the comments seem rather dubious.
Average Temperature (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing I've not really been able to figure out from the entire climate discussion is what is meant by "average temperature" in the first place.
The idea of taking some temperature measurements at various geographic locations and then averaging those values doesn't seem to make much physical sense to me, because there is no meaningful method by which to perform an average. Consider using an "area based average." This sounds reasonable: put your measurements in some regular grid, assume the temperature varies continuously between those points, and compute an average. I would argue that's a terrible method, because temperature is not a continuous quantity: if you put two temperature probes any distance apart, there is no meaningful way to estimate the temperature variation between those points. It could be linear between them, it could be nonlinear such that the temperature is higher between the two points, it could be nonlinear such that it is lower between the two points.
I am much more willing to look at other parameters which do have a better "average" information content. Sea level, snow cover (both max and min amounts, as well as time spent at those amounts) because those are inherently continuous phenomena that are not subject to interpolation errors.
Actually, a question and it may actually convince me to accept the concept of "average temperature": do thermal satellites have the capability to do a true area-continuous temperature measurement?
I have other questions as well, for instance, is average temperature really the critical parameter or is it median temperature? Actual max vs actual min? Is it something more related to the square of the deviation from the mean ("signal power")?
I have a hard time believing that an area-average temperature is an adequate parametrization of climate. Or, perhaps what I'm asking is, what climate effects are actually correlated so strongly with the mean temperature (how statistically significant is that correlation)? And how geographically dependent is that correlation?
Re:real science (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact is the debate would be too boring for anyone to care. If there is a warming trend or a cooling trend (and there's no clear evidence either way, face it...) we're talking about a temperature change so small no one not using this as an excuse to get more funding for something or get (re-)elected cares. That's why it's so insane. Those that want to embrace the whole "Climate change" insanity couldn't care less about the climate (Hello Al....) they just want power over others and money to do as they please.
THIS HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT SCIENCE OR CLIMATE (any more than traffic tickets are about public safety)!! WAKE THE HELL UP!
Re:real science (Score:2, Interesting)
there is no global scientific conspiracy to force you back into the dark ages and to live like vegan hippies
Well, without the massive amounts of petrochemicals that are used to make fertilisers, there won't be any vegans. Ecologically speaking we can't afford to keep burning oil or pouring it into the ground. Once the oil's gone, it's going to be a mixture of livestock and arable farming, and we'll be all the better for it.
Re:real science (Score:1, Interesting)
You're right. There is no debate. No legitimate scientist believes in global warming as a condition caused by human activity and there's very little evidence of warming at all (in fact there's a lot of historical evidence that we're entering a cooling period). The fact that people blame oil companies for this type of thing would be funny if it weren't so stupid.
You need to do a little reading outside of the NY or LA Times son...
Re:I am confident this thread won't become a flame (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Once again, climate != weather (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been warming for much more than that. 20,000 years ago, there was 2,000 feet of ice above the spot where I'm sitting. If only cavemen hadn't used so much CO2 releasing fire.
Re:Lose / Lose Wager (Score:4, Interesting)
And in another analogy he compares a 0.06% change in your weight form 175.0 lbs to 175.1 lbs over a decade to a 0.6% increase in global temperature from the mean of around 57.563 F to 57.923 F.
From 57.563 F to 57.923 F is an increase of 0.07%. You can't use 0 F as a zero point for percent increase, as Fahrenheit isn't a zero-based temperature scale. I converted to Kelvin. You could equally use Rankine, but that's unacceptably evil.
It's usually not particularly meaningful to talk about percentage increases in temperature.
To be fair, it's also not particularly meaningful to talk about percentage increases in body weight.
Re:Once again, climate != weather (Score:4, Interesting)
"The global average temperature has been warming for 40-50 years." It's been warming for much more than that. 20,000 years ago, there was 2,000 feet of ice above the spot where I'm sitting.
Yes, but not continuously. It cooled heading into the Little Ice Age [wikipedia.org], for example.
Re:real science (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right. There is no debate. No legitimate scientist believes in global warming as a condition caused by human activity and there's very little evidence of warming at all (in fact there's a lot of historical evidence that we're entering a cooling period).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2u4zNGtnY8&feature=related [youtube.com]
Yep, long term (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Once again, climate != weather (Score:3, Interesting)
some things ... can't be predicted ...like climate (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is simply that they don't -at all- have confidence in their methods. There are several basic problems :
Climate is chaotic. In fact, mathematical chaos theory *is* the original climate theory. Literally. Chaos theory started out as an analysis of long-term weather trends over Britain, and all collected British weather data (quite a lot, given the activities of their fleet, accurate data spanning all continents and seas, several hundred years). There was a tiny little problem : weather data did not obey the law of large numbers, making the basic assumption of statistics invalid. Temperature turned out ... not to have an average. Not to have a standard deviation. Whoops.
That means that, mathematically speaking, AGW could be 100% accurate today, and that still doesn't give you one iota of predictability. Weather, and long term climate could still become totally unresponsive to CO2 overnight. More specifically in a given chaotic system *any* prediction (within certain limits) *will* happen, just not known when.
In a chaotic dataset, there is *no* way to predict the future, no matter the amount and accuracy of the available data, nor can the quality of the system help you (except - if you're God and know *everything*. By that we mean the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe. This is often joked about - if a person can't give the lotto outcomes for the next 100 years, he can't give you the weather -or climate- in 100 years either.
It's a joke similar to the butterfly flapping it's wings in the amazon. You miss one butterfly ...
Second : climate scientists are not total idiots in the math department. They use prediction rules in the form of differential equations, then they simulate them with lots of data. What these equations do is essentially : given the situation at x(t = 0.000001) they allow you to "jump ahead" and determine the situation at x(t = 0.02).
The problems are simple. Either you work with very small jumps in timing, or you work with big jumps in timing. Very small jumps in timing mean relatively small errors, but you accumulate a LOT of them. The error margin grows exponentially, so you can imagine that even with a tiny error, before a few days pass in your prediction, there's a lot of error. Or you work with big jumps in time, but then you can't accurately simulate "the little things" (the effect of smaller variations in geography for example). So you have a big (and unknown) error margin, but, because you don't accumulate so much of them, it is *assumed* you can predict further out (this is not actually true, but we don't have any other method to do this, so we merrily assume this won't blow up in our faces - despite, obviously, this having blown up in quite a few faces already and is well known. Scientists, like real people, are quite tolerant of imperfect methods when there's no alternative)
You know when the error margin on the best climate models exceeds 100% (ie. there is more error than prediction) ? After 5 days. Obviously, knowing this full well, scientists are *very* wary of making predictions 10 years out.
And rightfully so : if you track the IPCC's predictions you will find that the current situation is actually outside of the 95% error margin of *ALL* IPCC climate reports, except the last one. In all 3 cases, we're below the predicted value : it is a *lot* cooler today than scientists predicted 2010 would be in 1990 and 2000 (*lot* as compared to the scientists own specified error margin). For both IPCC reports we're outside the 95% confidence interval (and for the 2010 one, we're not all that far from the edge either, heh, "next year in jerusalem" as they say).
Again, scientists know perfectly well that this is so (there's published papers about this, lots of discussion and consternation about them, big egos, lots of screaming, before everything settled down and everyone basically decided to ignore them after a few scientists were fired). So, surprise, surpris
Re:real science (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the Theory of Evolution does not do that. But, it does say that if one takes two isolated communities and puts each under different and contradicting pressures, the communities will select for different traits and THAT can be tested.
People claim that climate change is settled science, and it seems to me that settled science should be able to predict a temperature change over a decade, especially when there is allegedly so much data. Seriously, why can't they just publish a table that says if a decade from now the CO2 level is x, then the increase in temperature should have changed by y?
Re:real science (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really, his winter forecasts [google.com] for every year since 2005 have been wrong. His method is that of a fortune teller, ie: make lots of predictions and highlight the ones that are by chance correct or close to correct.
On a side note, climate scientists are not adverse to betting against global cooling [realclimate.org].
Been there done that (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a look at http://theclimatebet.com/ [theclimatebet.com] to see an earlier example. A similarly (un)qualified guy offered to bet that temperatures would be unchanged over ten years. He tried to get Al Gore to bet, of course without success. So he started this website to track who would have won. At first it looked good for him and he updated regularly, crowing about his success. But then things changed and started warming up. Now the website is abandoned. He didn't have the guts to document his failure. I imagine much the same will result from this new bet.
Re:Correct (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no reason to believe, even if we were right about CO2 emissions increasing the average global temperature by 6C, that we should reduce CO2 emissions at all. Even if you take, as a given, that temps are rising, and anthropogenic CO2 is causing it, there's not a shred of evidence that the particular distribution of increased average temperature will be detrimental to humanity.
In any case, every plan for CO2 mitigation, according to the very models which are hyped to encourage us to stop using petroleum, would be but a fraction of the temp increase over the next century. Cutting the global economy by 50% in order to save 1C out of 6C seems dubious at best.
That all being said, what is the "golden" moment of climate prediction? I keep hearing that we can make these long term predictions because we're looking at long term trends, but is there a point at which climate predictions become less accurate? That is to say, if we can't make a climate prediction out 10 years, but we can make one out 100 years, is it also true that we can't make one out 200 years? Is there a parabolic curve of accuracy here?