Python Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In Over 100 Published Studies (vice.com) 121
Over 100 published studies may have incorrect results thanks to a glitchy piece of Python code discovered by researchers at the University of Hawaii.
An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.
"This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the new paper reads. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]."
Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria... Under supervision of University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant chemistry professor Rui Sun, Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper by Patrick Willoughby, Matthew Jansma, and Thomas Hoye in the journal Nature Protocols . The code computes chemical shift values for NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a common technique used by chemists to determine the molecular make-up of a sample. Luo's results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams' group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results.
Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files.
The researcher who wrote the flawed script told Motherboard that the new study was "a beautiful example of science working to advance the work we reported in 2014. They did a tremendous service to the community in figuring this out."
Sun described the original authors as "very gracious," saying they encouraged the publication of the findings.
An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.
"This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the new paper reads. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]."
Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria... Under supervision of University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant chemistry professor Rui Sun, Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper by Patrick Willoughby, Matthew Jansma, and Thomas Hoye in the journal Nature Protocols . The code computes chemical shift values for NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a common technique used by chemists to determine the molecular make-up of a sample. Luo's results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams' group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results.
Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files.
The researcher who wrote the flawed script told Motherboard that the new study was "a beautiful example of science working to advance the work we reported in 2014. They did a tremendous service to the community in figuring this out."
Sun described the original authors as "very gracious," saying they encouraged the publication of the findings.
For those wondering what ACTUALLY happened (Score:2)
Luo’s results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams’ group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results. Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files.
For example, if the code led Williams to wrongly identify the contents of his sample, chemists trying to recreate the molecule to test as a potential cancer drug would be chasing after the wrong compound, Williams said.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks! The summary and article are crap.
That's from this tweet [twitter.com]
I'm still not sure what the ~1,000 lines of code was?
The pdf [acs.org] is behind a paywall.
Re: (Score:2)
Looks like this pdf [acs.org] (Characterization of Leptazolines A-D, Polar Oxazolines from the Cyanobacterium Leptolyngbya sp., Reveals a Glitch with the âoeWilloughby-Hoyeâ Scripts for Calculating NMR Chemical Shifts) is available. I don't see the python script there other then this blurb:
Re:For those wondering what ACTUALLY happened (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone taking bets it was on case sensitivity?
Re: For those wondering what ACTUALLY happened (Score:1)
One thing is clear...
Scientists are shitty at statistics and at coding.
Re: (Score:2)
Everybody is shitty at statistics except mathematicians and actuarial accountants.
The problem is, mathematicians are shitty at anything concrete, because details, and actuarial accountants are already too narrowly specialized, and highly paid, to do anything else.
Re: For those wondering what ACTUALLY happened (Score:2)
Said a scientist?
That dissing aside, a large majority of paid coders write bollocks code most of the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds plausable... seems like they tried to read in order while the sequence of files was not similar.
Re: For those wondering what ACTUALLY happened (Score:2)
"Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files."
I took that to mean differences in how order of directory contents are returned. Case sensitivity would be unlikely to surprise even python developers, but I bet people are regularly surprised to find the order of files in a directory are unspecified and not what you want to think they'd be.
Re: (Score:2)
... but I bet people are regularly surprised to find the order of files in a directory are unspecified and not what you want to think they'd be.
Me to. The problem is that most coders have no clue how a filesystem actually works and, to make matters worse, are completely unaware of that shortcoming. Dunning-Kruger for coders.
Re: For those wondering what ACTUALLY happened (Score:4, Interesting)
They start out completely unaware of how a filesystem actually works, and so they don't make any assumptions, and all is well.
It isn't until they hit Mount Stupid and start thinking they really do understand filesystems that these mistakes happen.
IME even if you read all manuals, and consult the manuals while doing something with files, the filesystem will still find a way to ignore you and place the files in an arbitrary order in the directory. The files have an order. And the filesystems have various ways of ordering the files. But the file utilities, both stand alone and in language libraries, tend to make claims or implications about the order that they can't actually enforce.
The only thing that works is to stick to complete, Socrates-style ignorance; know only that filesystems write directory entries however they want, and that to be ordered, you have to order them yourself. That includes not only ignoring any ideas you have about how the filesystem orders things, but also refusing to believe that any library will, by default, order things they way you want. Because they will seem to be doing what they said. For a long time.
I used to have an mp3 player that could only play files in directory order. Without using a special directory-editing program to fix them, there was just no way to choose an order. Even copying single files in order didn't work without running a sync after every copy.
Re: (Score:1)
There's more to file ordering than case sensitivity. Collation encompasses not just case sensitivity, but how international characters sort versus their US-ASCII equivalents, where Kana characters fit into things, whether numeric names are sorted as numbers or plain old strings, etc..
Since most operating systems support multiple concurrent (and different) file systems any algorithm that relies on "sort ordering" of file names is doomed to fail not just on different operating systems but on different file sy
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files."
I took that to mean differences in how order of directory contents are returned. Case sensitivity would be unlikely to surprise even python developers, but I bet people are regularly surprised to find the order of files in a directory are unspecified and not what you want to think they'd be.
I've lived that dream. I deal with a large number of large files of measurement data from in-development silicon. They all need statistical analysis of various types. The end result of employing various schemes is that all the necessary context information (voltage, temp, chip-ID, iteration, etc) gets encoded in the filename and the scripts parse the filenames and build tables so you can process files by your choice of parameter and choice of order.
Then output information can put the filename against the da
Re: (Score:2)
that was 100 is_less_than_symbol 2.
Re:For those wondering what ACTUALLY happened (Score:5, Funny)
Getting ready to blame MICROS~1 again.
Re: (Score:2)
How's that 255 total path length working out?
Re: (Score:3)
More generally I would bet that this was a locale problem. Changing the locale will affect the sort order of pretty much all characters.
For example, on Linux, the UTF8 locales are ignoring white spaces while the C locale does not.
(bash) export LANG=en_US.utf8
(bash) printf "X 1\nX2\nX 3" | sort
X 1
X2
X 3
(bash) export LANG=C
(bash) printf "X 1\nX2\nX 3" | sort
X 1
X 3
X2
In servers, the locale is usually set to C but on desktop machines it is usually equal set to en_US.utf8 (or whatever your preferred language c
Re: (Score:2)
Remind me not to bet against you. =P
That would make the most sense.
Re: (Score:2)
You'd lose that bet. It was glob.glob(...) returning files in a non-reproducible way.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the importance of reading docs carefully. The documentation for os.listdir says:
The list is in arbitrary order, ...
In other words, no promises about order.
The REAL problem.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, everyone is barking up the wrong tree I suspect.
The REAL problem is their computations are not numerically stable!
The order of file processing should not damn matter, and if it DOES, then something is wrong in their system.
Any instability should be known, allowed for, and reported as a margin of error in the results.
Obviously it was not, so the whole system is bogus.
To force a certain order of files is NOT a fix. it is a hack to get the consistently same randomly incorrect result.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That is not a "glitch" in Python. That is the effect of incompetent coders that do not have the first clue about how systems work and that they need to enforce any state they depend on by themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
That seems awfully specialized for such a high number.
Here we go again... (Score:2)
This resembles the bug in the early Pentiums from Intel that showed up in statistics textbooks of 1999. It was an error in the lookup tables for 11/17ths that made some graphs that should flow gracefully show a bump.
Re: (Score:2)
Try looking at the recommended computation for the APT test cutoff values vs false probability rate in SP800-90B.
They recommend using excel - Hence IEEE 754. Hence 53 bits of precision. This rapidly falls apart when you want false positive (I.E. declaring a fail over good data) probabilities of less than 1 in 2 to the 64.
Then looking back into the tables in the spec, you can see that the figures are indeed wrong. But wrong in a different way. It took me forever to work it out - but it's this: The binomal qu
Re: (Score:2)
Beta? Maybe it was gamma. I can't keep these details in my head. That's why we have the internet.
Re: Here we go again... (Score:2)
"Python code" (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary and the article are ridiculous. The real scoop is simple: some scientific programmer assumed that some file-listing/loading function (os.listdir, maybe?) returned always the same order of files, which it does not. It is not a bug in Python at all, as it is well described in the documentation. It was a stupid assumption made by some PhD student, which in science almost always have terrible programming habits and very superficial knowledge of the language they're programming in.
Truth is, when a group publishes their code with a paper, it is rarely used by anyone else, unless it's published and maintained as a toolbox. Taking the code off a scientific paper, which was used for exactly that one paper and nothing else, and using it with blind faith is never a good idea. This code is not audited or tested in any meaningful way. So why publish it? As the authors of the original paper and the paper that published the correction very directly stated, that's how science is supposed to work. Publishing your code is now done for the same reason that one publishes all the details of the experiment and all the math behind the models: so that the scientific community can evaluate the work and see it if holds up.
Re: (Score:2)
that's how science is supposed to work. Publishing your code is now done for the same reason that one publishes all the details of the experiment and all the math behind the models: so that the scientific community can evaluate the work and see it if holds up.
Exactly. Open source software in general was modelled after the (centuries old) scientific method. If you use closed software in your publication, it's not really science, because nobody can check how your method works. Or as your math teacher always said, it's zero points if you don't show your work.
I can't access the full paper now, and I'm stuck wondering how on Earth could a method like this rely on filename ordering...
Different point of View (Score:2)
If you use closed software in your publication, it's not really science, because nobody can check how your method works.
I disagree somewhat: describing what you think the code does should be sufficient for most papers. All you need is sufficient detail for someone else to be able to reproduce what you think you did in your analysis. Forcing someone else to write their own code, instead of using yours, makes it easier to catch errors since they are unlikely to make the same mistakes that you did. The case in point is a good example of this.
Re: (Score:2)
There are two problem with that:
- Once things become more complicated, it is not feasible to rewrite everything every time. So only established labs who can build on their own software could reproduce more complicated methods which would be a problem in my opinion.
- It is the reviewer's job to make sure that the methods are described in sufficient detail. But again, this is almost impossible to achieve for sophisticated methods and small details are often overlooked. If the source is available, the code can
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. And if filename ordering was critical then why weren't there anomalous results that would have set off suspicion? Or were the authors just lucky in making an assumption that was matched by their OS?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary and the article are ridiculous. The real scoop is simple: some scientific programmer assumed that some file-listing/loading function (os.listdir, maybe?) returned always the same order of files, which it does not.
It probably should, though. The primary use case for Python is to serve the people who are confused by semicolons. Why wouldn't they be confused about this, too?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
It is not a bug in Python at all, as it is well described in the documentation.
It may be documented, but when all Python is shit code you kind of have to blame the language. How it's so popular in STEM I have no idea (oh wait, they teach that and Java to non-devs who need to code occasionally and are too lazy to learn non-shit languages on their own.)
Re: (Score:2)
It may be documented, but when all Python is shit code you kind of have to blame the language.
The thing is, any language used by lots of non-programmers is going to end up full of shit code, because that is the kind of code non-programmers write.
I'm sure the average code-quality of e.g. Haskell or Erlang is significantly higher, but that would be because only really good programmers ever try to use those languages in the first place. Joey in the chem lab, OTOH, is going to use whatever is easy enough for him to get his chemistry project done, and these days that's likely to mean Python.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Coder incompetence, plain and simple, nothing else.
Re: (Score:2)
However, if the function is a function which calls the Operating System function to retrieve a list of files, it is obviously dependent on the Operating System, the FileSystem, and the files which happen to be in the directory at the time the function is called. Assuming that you hold all those invariant (ie, always use the same Operating System to retrieve the list of the same files located on the same filesystem) then you will get the same result.
Change one of those dependencies, and you will get the res
The actual python script (Score:2)
For those interested, the fixed python script is available here: (and it's just 387 lines):
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl... [acs.org]
Description of the bug (Score:5, Informative)
I couldn't find the original script, but looking at the corrected version, it's fairly obvious what happened.
The script used many pairs of files to "compute something important". The files are named along the pattern nmr-xxx.out and freq-xxx.out.
The authors used the standard Python function glob("*.out") to list all the filenames. They assumed that the first nmr- filename matched with the first freq- filename. However, contrary to the bash command "ls *.out", glob() doesn't sort the output (it essentially returns the order the files are stored on the hard disk, which tends to often be in the same order as they were stored but no promises are made).
So pairs of files where "randomly" made, which lead to incorrect computations/results... sometimes
In defence of Python, this behaviour of glob() is warned in the first line of the documentation.
Re: (Score:2)
In defence of Python, this behaviour of glob() is warned in the first line of the documentation.
And in addition, it is an entirely sane default. Sorting takes extra effort and worse than linear in addition. It is quite rightfully left to the coder to arrange the files in any order they need or use them as presented and avoiding that O(n log(n)) additional effort. Now, "ls" is a different matter. It is completely correctly trying for some user friendliness at the expense of speed per default.
The files weren't being sorted at all (Score:4, Informative)
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.10... [acs.org]
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl... [acs.org]
Note: the zip archives are titled incorrectly - the one with the "raw data" is actually the python script.
From the README_text.txt:
(although the last line is actually indented incorrectly in the readme - I've checked the source and it's as it should be).
So the original script was relying on the order of files returned from glob.glob(), which is not and has never been defined by Python.
https://docs.python.org/2/libr... [python.org]
https://docs.python.org/3/libr... [python.org]
(emphasis mine).
So we're not just talking about different results on different operating systems, but potentially on every single machine or even every single run depending on filesystem implementation e.g. does it naturally return files in lexicographic order, creation timestamp order, some arbitrary but consistent order, or a totally random order (I don't know of a filesystem that does this, but it would be a good fuzzing technique).
Re: (Score:1)
Jesus Christ.
Why not just "return glob.glob('*.out').sort()"
Python not Ruby (Score:1)
Should be "return sorted(glob.glob('*.out'))"
Re: (Score:2)
"Why not just "return glob.glob('*.out').sort()""
Perhaps because .sort() on a list sorts in place and returns None.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the readme is wrong - the whole function is:
Re: (Score:2)
Little benefit is gained for speed, yet confusion increases for all but expert programmers. There is nothing wrong with more explicit logical statements.
Also, comments would help. What is the world like such that, if no .out files exist, use .log instead. And if "if not (list object)" is an obvious feature, and better than len, comment that too. I find it hard to believe len wouldn't check the same internal variable "not" checks.
Re: (Score:2)
Python truth values are so fundamental that it's expected that anyone using python should understand how they work. It is idiomatic to use:
if sequence:
rather than:
if len(sequence) > 0:
Python's short-circuiting behaviour however is less well known, and is now actively discouraged in favour of the ternary expression and other constructs.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but I wanted it to be easily understandable by a Python neophyte (as the authors obviously are).
In general I don't use short-circuiting behaviour when I actually want to use on of the inputs (as opposed to just checking the truth values) in order to avoid confusion for those who might be coming to the code from other languages. It might seem perfectly clear to you or me, but the level of confusion I've seen this simple construct cause makes me cautious.
Re: (Score:1)
That's a fair restriction. It looks like it should evaluate to a boolean, unless you know the language has this extra trick.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the call to sort() is in-place, so there's only two lists being created ...
Chemistry dept. coding (Score:2)
Alternative title: Chemists are bad at programming, news at 11.
Anti-open-source bias (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, even authors who benefit from freely released source code seem to have unflagging faith in "commercial software". In fact, the only reasons these authors were able to diagonse and fix the bug was that the code was freely available.
Instead, scientists should verify all software that they use, commercial or not.
They should have used scala ! (Score:2)
Software Audits... (Score:2)
Kudos to the original authors for gracious acknowledgement of the correction.
Might have been a good idea to have a software expert audit code published in scientific papers.
Re: (Score:3)
Talk about groupthink: You denialists don't even have models. All youv'e got is a shared deep-seated sense of truthiness, and an unfounded faith that the laws of thermodynamics somehow don't apply to you.
Re: (Score:1)
Being unwilling to change your mind in the face of any amount of evidence is not being "thoughtful," it's being deliberately ignorant.
Re: (Score:1)
Hype and clickbait are not evidence. I haven't seen anything about climate change that was straight news in years from the warming side.
Lots of people have changed their minds from the socialists are completely making this up to get power for themselves to the socialists aren't completely making this up, merely greatly exaggerating it and exploiting fear to get power for themselves.
If we could get rid of the power grabs, the exaggeration, the hype, the clickbait, and the tribalism, then there might be more
Re: (Score:2)
Thoughts are just a category of feefees.
I know, I know, when you think that thought it just feels so true. But unfortunately, truth is not a type of feeling.
That's the part you're in denial about; there mere existence of knowledge.
Re: (Score:2)
No such reasoning stated.
Re: Cautionary tale about software models (Score:2)
His reasoning appears to be: "I think it imprudent to slavishly accept as MUH FACTS the output of complicated computer models for which the source code is not publicly accessible."
Re: (Score:1)
Go away, fanatic. It is people like you that will spell the end for humanity. If we should get very lucky this time and survive, then people like you will just arrange for a next chance at ending it.
Re: (Score:2)
Thoughtful consideration is not fanaticism, except in the eyes of zealots.
Re: (Score:3)
This was not "thoughtful consideration". Otherwise, you have to include flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers and quite a few other people that hold unsustainable beliefs into the group that does "thoughtful consideration". It is not the logic that fails here. All these people have rational arguments. It is the common sense in selecting the base-facts that is absent.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone interested in facts would acknowledge that anti-vaxxers are only mostly wrong. Vaccines have caused problems in the past. People should still get vaccinated, but there's no need to be a zealot about it.
You can if you want though.
Your climate zeal doesn't seem to be doing you much good though. You can't hate your way to a healthy climate.
Re: (Score:2)
You really do not get it, do you? Well, deniers of all kind are basically one thing: stupid. You can serve as a nice example.
Re:Cautionary tale about software models (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Not a closed system.
Re: (Score:3)
And yet, an examination of the details of your complaint would end up verifying the intended implication.
It isn't a "closed system," because as stated that is an absolute that nothing achieves. But in reality, if it is effectively a closed system, that is good enough to understand the problem. And in fact, that is as close as science can get to a closed system, because absolutes don't actually exist.
Re: (Score:2)
You are incorrect. Energy radiates in both directions in significant amounts.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Cautionary tale about software models (Score:2)
Yes. The question is how much does it block, and whether the system reacts to that in any other way. This is where his criticism of the models is at the very least a valid concern. If the models are wrong then that's a serious problem because they'll either understate or overstate the magnitude of warming.
It's embarrassing that he's been modded down as flamebait, and that most of the responses are using inflammatory language to attack his character rather than responding to what he said. No, suggesting
Re: (Score:2)
Really? His first sentence was this
But you believe computer models for climate change despite them being closed, with unpublished code that very, very few people understand.
And the standard reply is always something along the lines of this [slashdot.org]
False. Any scientific paper that published information about a model includes the model. I read probably half a dozen papers about biological models every week.
It continues on from there. Seems pretty much flamebait, maybe you prefer to classify it as troll?
" and whether the system reacts to that in any other way."... So where is the magic? Why hasn't anyone found it yet? Plenty of very wealthy people and companies have a very vested interest in disproving climate change. Why haven't they been able to f
Re: (Score:2)
And you used the word "some" which is an acknowledgment that it's not a closed system.
The original point was to be thoughtful and skeptical of apparent exaggerations. This "closed system" nonsense is an example. It's clearly false. Do you think saying clearly false things is helpful?
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't matter. The Earth + the Sun might as well be a closed system, and then you analyze how much of the energy stayed on the Earth and how much went somewhere else.
The closededness of the system has nothing to do with it, except in that we don't have a back door to vent the heat out of; we're stuck with it.
Re: (Score:2)
You are a dimwit. You are not adding energy. You cannot add energy.
You know the sun adds energy right?
All these "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" fuckwits are working on solving THE WRONG PROBLEM. Which is not entirely unexpected. When all you have ever seen is a nail, you assume the only tool in existence is a hammer..
I think the tool in this scenario may just be you...
Re: (Score:2)
The Earth is the temperature it is because of 2 things, and 2 things only*
Input energy flux, and output energy flux
If you slow the output flux, The Earth will warm until equilibrium is met. When view from space, it's a very simple thermodynamic system. The only complication is in figuring out what the feedbacks are of the reduced output flux, and how they affect the input flux.
* there's a slight amount of warming from the Earth's internal temper
Success story for Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientists are not just sceptical about computer models we are sceptical about everything including data and the experiments that collected it. Finding a mistake in someone's work is rewarded so you are completely wrong to claim that climate scientists are motivated towards ignoring serious flaws and errors in their code. If someone found a serious error that significantly affected the results in the code used in IPCC's predictions and kept quiet about it not only would they be damaging progress in their own field but they would be passing up a serious boost to their career and giving someone else the chance to find it and publish it first.
Re: (Score:2)
If someone found a serious error that significantly affected the results in the code used in IPCC's predictions and kept quiet about it not only would they be damaging progress in their own field but they would be passing up a serious boost to their career and giving someone else the chance to find it and publish it first.
"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it? - Phil Jones"
Re: (Score:2)
Scientists are not just sceptical about computer models we are sceptical about everything including data and the experiments that collected it.
My adviser was very unhappy when I took apart a function he'd been using for 20 years to see how it worked. Not because I was questioning it, but because it could potentially cast some doubt on 20 years of his research, and that of others.
But as you say, that's what scientists do.
In my case, it had a crude approximation for edge cases, and what I was working on was essentially all edge-cases, resulting in rather dubious output. His stuff was fine, because it was rare that his work got to those edges. Thus,
Re: (Score:2)
False. (Score:5, Informative)
False. Any scientific paper that published information about a model includes the model. I read probably half a dozen papers about biological models every week.
And the ones who do understand it are highly motivated toward one conclusion only.
False. That's not how science works. That's not how peer reviewed papers work.
Also, the IPCC continues to revise their predictions, almost always downward.
False. The IPCC's predictions have consistently been revised upwards not downwards.
Are you a paid shill of an oil/gas company, or are you really that uninformed? If you're very uninformed, why do you think that you are qualified to make blanket statements about things you don't understand?
Re: (Score:1)
No claim that the Maldives are under water and the 400,000 inhabitants all drowned in 2018?
Re: (Score:2)
Can you point me to the previous IPCC prediction for this?
Re: (Score:2)
The point was to be skeptical of some of the extreme predictions. If you are saying people should discount predictions when they don't come from the IPCC, you would be agreeing with the general point.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You quoted a four sentence article (that provides no sources) from an obscure Australian press group from 30 years ago.
How can a proven-incorrect 30-year prediction be less than 30 years old?
In 1990 the IPCC predicted 20cm sea level rise by 2030 [www.ipcc.ch]. That's not looking like a good prediction so far [wikipedia.org]. Maybe something will change before 2030.
The sea level rise from 1900 to 1990 was about 2 cm per decade. So in 1990, the IPCC was predicting 12cm of addition sea level rise beyond the 8cm you'd expect from the longer term trend projected forward 40 years. Trends so far show more like half that: 8cm for long term trend + 5 or 6cm
Wrong again. (Score:3)
The IPCC's forecasts have been almost exclusively on the conservative side for the past 30 years (https://report.ipcc.ch/srocc/pdf/SR
Re: (Score:2)
You should apologize to everyone here, really. Apologize to Humanity, if you really wanna be complete.
You are making assertions about scientific studies that are false- you are constructing conclusions and predictions that they didn't make, and misstating them. If it's just a lack of rigor on your part, apologize and be better. If it's attempts at building straw men, then- s
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Lol, you stupid shill. Your "real science" examples are climate denier blogs. Why don't you actually look at what a real scientist who was a real skeptic has to say about climate research: http://berkeleyearth.org/about... [berkeleyearth.org]
Dr. Muller was a real deal skeptic, but still had integrity, and took what he found to be believable skeptical claims and rigorously investigated them. When he did that, he was somewhat surprised at the outcome.
That is what being a skeptic looks like. Fraudulently representing what the res
Re: (Score:2)
t the left wants which is to take all our money from us so they can control us
That makes no sense. Who is trying to take your money, exactly? It wouldn't be the largest, most profitable industry on the p
Re: (Score:2)
But you believe computer models
Don't worry, the science is settled, the code doesn't matter anyway. We already know what we FEEL is right.
Notice I'm not saying ANYthing about climate change here, or anything else. Really. Compute, trust, but occasionally verify, but occasionally physically build and destructive-testing the GD thing.
And I always wondered about those "Just as good as animal testing" software. For high-school student, of course. It's basic learning on well-understood things. For tens of millions of people, maybe yo
Re: Cautionary tale about software models (Score:2)
The fun begins when you ask them, âoeWhat do the models say will happen if the CO2 output drops markedly?â
They will not (cannot?) give any sort of projection at all.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a straight up lie.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Plus side, it doesn't matter in the least, all fire and ashes from here on out.
Predictions like that in the past: many. Percentage of such predictions that have come true: 0.00%.
Re: (Score:2)
I do believe the study that says that nuclear war between Pakistan and India will solve global warming immediately, with the added benefit of a reduced population load on the planet. Let fly the bombs! It will be much cheaper than all the current rage of shit, however, the politicians will have to find a new method to rob everyone since they will not be able to use the "Carbon Tax" justification anymore.