Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Global warming computer model # 66 is gonna be the charm

From Sun News:

[A] German study released last week that claims all 65 climate-model computers used by the IPCC to predict the future impact of CO2 on climate - every last one of them -has failed to foresee this 17-year pause in temperature rise. 

This is like a comedy skit.  

29 comments:

  1. Michael,

    The comedy skit is that you keep on making the same bogus claim repeatedly, despite being corrected repeatedly. The 'global warming pause' was due to cherry picking the data set, starting the period in a year with a strong El Niño effect, which dumps heat from the oceans into the atmosphere resulting in average lower atmosphere temperatures increasing by 1 degree Celsius and finishing in a year with a moderate La Niña effect, which has the opposite effect with heat being taken up by the oceans, resulting in lower atmosphere cooling.

    It's also a fallacy to equate the average temperature of the lower atmosphere as the sole measure of global temperatures. It also includes the oceans, the land and the cryosphere (ice and snow).

    The oceans are continuing to warm. The Arctic icecap continues to disappear. The Arctic ice cap might have an area 60% greater than the corresponding period in 2012, the minimum recorded year, but it's broken ice with a lower volume. In previous years, a lot of this year's ice would have been carried south by ocean currents and winds to melt in lower latitudes.

    Sea ice area is higher this year not because the Arctic is cooler. It's just because of the weather.

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    1. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavySeptember 17, 2013 at 7:04 AM

      backfield, you're amazing, my friend. You tell better just-so stories than Rudyard Kipling.

      BTW, did you ever send Magnasco your theory of how the peripheral auditory system is able to do better than the Heisenberg-Gabor limit? If you ever do, I'll pay you for a certified copy of his reply. I want to put it in my Lysenko File.

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    2. Georgie,

      You need to get out of the bathtub sometimes. If you start with a warm year and finish with a cool year, naturally you're going to understate warming significantly.

      The Heisenberg-Gabor limit is mildly interesting. From my reading, the reason why it's beaten is because of the processing done by the auditory cortex. It's learned, which is the reason why professional musicians do much better than average. And why their auditory cortices are larger and more developed.

      If you have an alternate explanation, then what is it? Perhaps you have a link to one of your YouTube videos?

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    3. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavySeptember 17, 2013 at 7:38 AM

      batfark, invisible gorillas and paleontological just-so stories are very boring.

      Your reading of why the Heisenberg-Gabor limit is beaten is typically flawed:

      [C]urrent work in [the Magnasco-Hudspeth] collaboration centers on the complex behavior of groups of hair cells, our primary auditory sensors, and on the ribbon synapse, the first “digital” step in the transduction of sound into neural impulses, whose extraordinary timing accuracy is the underpinning of our auditory acuity.
      --- Scientists and Research: Rockefeller University website

      No, I don't have an alternative explanation. I don't have a lab anymore, nor did I do that particular kind of work. But I love reading your amusing theories.

      By the way, batfark, what do you have against YouTube? I use YouTube resources when I teach, and the producer of the invisible gorilla YouTube was the author of the book you read and the Principal Investigator of the work you so admire.

      You should visit YouTube more often. The site links to serious stuff like CERN videos, and they even have comedy like Richard Dawkins pontificating and cats doing weird things.

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    4. Georgie,

      The abstract in 'Physical Review Letters' written by Magnasco states that it's processing in the brain that overcomes the Heisenberg-Gabor limit.

      Which is what I claimed.

      I don't have anything against YouTube videos. I do have something against your vindictive senility. I recommended the BOOK 'the Invisible Gorilla' and immediately you impugned me as recommending a video, as being the only source I could understand.

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  2. "The 'global warming pause' was due to cherry picking the data set, starting the period in a year with a strong El Niño effect, which dumps heat from the oceans into the atmosphere resulting in average lower atmosphere temperatures increasing by 1 degree Celsius and finishing in a year with a moderate La Niña effect, which has the opposite effect with heat being taken up by the oceans, resulting in lower atmosphere cooling."

    Okay. So why didn't one of the 65 computer models predict this?

    Your movement makes a lot of predictions and none of them turn out to be true. You always have a hindsight explanation for why it didn't pan out but nothing more. You're starting to look quite silly.

    By the way, to say that there has been a seventeen year pause is a statement of fact, not cherrypicking evidence. It's simply evidence you don't like.

    Joey

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    1. Joey,

      El Niño/la Niña events are impossible to predict, so no climate model can predict what the lower atmosphere temperature will be. That's the reason why climate is measured over longer periods of at least 30 years to overcome shorter term unpredictable influences such as El Niño/la Niña events, weaker or stronger solar cycles or volcanic eruptions.

      There have been previous periods of atmospheric cooling or stasis in the past 50 years, but the overall trend has still been to warming of the lower atmosphere.

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    2. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavySeptember 17, 2013 at 7:20 AM

      Joey, when batfark gets his Climate Face on, it's best to just hit the Batfarkian Compression key (that's the key on your current keyboard labeled "delete"; batfark has singlehandedly, and on his own authority, redefined data compression).

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    3. When it comes to scientific theories, predictions are really where the rubber meets the road. Good theories have predictive powers because they correctly describe the forces at work and because their results are reproducible.

      When your theory produces nothing but bad predictions it's time to get a new theory. Some people, I think, aren't willing to do that because it would man admitting that the so-called deniers were right. And that's just too much humble pie to eat.

      Here's one: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/wrong-al-gore-predicted-arctic-summer-ice-could-disappear-2013

      Al Gore predicted at his ig-Nobel Prize acceptance that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013. Okay, he hedged his bet by saying it could be, not that it would be.

      That prediction turned out to be quite wrong but of course the Bachfiends of the world will always have an explanation as to why. Oh, I see, it's the weather, not the climate.

      The theory lives on, despite the fact that it failed to do what all good scientific theories do--predict. Stop giving us excuses and give us some results.

      JQ

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    4. JQ,

      You really need to improve your reading skills. The weather was the explanation why the Arctic sea ice area had increased in 2013 over 2012. Most of the end of Summer sea ice was broken ice floes, which in the previous year had been carried by winds and ocean currents to lower latitudes where it melted.

      It didn't happen in 2013. The broken sea ice remained at higher latitudes where it didn't melt as rapidly. The ice volume, however, has decreased.

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  3. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavySeptember 17, 2013 at 7:16 AM

    I think this guy had the best idea:

    One of the report’s own authors, Professor Myles Allen, the director of Oxford University’s Climate Research Network, said this should be the last such assessment.

    "The idea of producing a document of near-biblical infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works, and we need to look very carefully about what the IPCC does in future," Allen said.

    --- FoxNews

    A misrepresentation of how science works. I agree completely.

    Now who is this guy? Well, nobody, really. Why, he doesn't even dance around tree ring cores with a bone in his nose doing dendromancy with a magic hockey stick. According to Wiki, he's just

    [H]ead of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department[,] Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, and a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford.

    "A misrepresentation of how science works." That's a quote for the Greentard File.

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    1. Georgie,

      Professor Myles Allen has been misquoted by David Rose of Daily Mail infamy. Being repeated by Fox News doesn't make it any truer.

      What Professor Allen actually said in the interview was that he favoured the IPCC going to a system of shorter annual reports instead of the much longer ones at 6 or 7 year intervals.

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    2. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavySeptember 17, 2013 at 7:45 AM

      Did he say this or not?

      "The idea of producing a document of near-biblical infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works"

      If not, give me a reference where he repudiates it and I will withdraw my attribution. Because I trust FoxNews to report the news accurately more than I trust you, my invisible gorilla-loving cyberfriend. Much of what you believe can be safely relegated to Windows' Batfarkian Compression Bin (currently known as the Recycle Bin).

      Nothing personal. I think you're a very smart guy and a serious one, too. You're just wrong about many things because you have a need to fit square facts into the round hole of your ideology.

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    3. Allen is completely right about that. Science that has no puzzles to solve is a dead science. It's engineering. Take geometrical optics. There are no surprises in it anymore. It has nowhere to develop.

      Climate science is still developing. It has to deal with more uncertainties than optics. But that does not meant it has nothing to say. The earth has been warming up in the last century, just like the scientists expected. The greenhouse effect was predicted by Fourier; the effect of man-produced CO2 was pointed out by Arrhenius. Both of these men were highly respected physicists.

      Global warming is a reality. The Arctic ice cap is shrinking. COnservatives can deny it all they want, but they are merely delaying the day of reckoning.

      Hoo

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    4. Question:

      It is not only remarkable that all of the computer models on AGW were wrong. It is remarkable that all of the models were wrong in the same direction.

      Models that are wrong for innocent reasons are just as likely to underestimate effects as overestimate effects.

      The most reasonable explanation for 65 models that all overestimated, rather than a mixture of over and underestimation, is that the modelers were biases or committed fraud.

      The real scandal isn't simply that the models were wrong. It's that they were all wrong in a way that advanced AGW ideology and stimulated AGW research funding.

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    5. Michael,

      If you start a series with a warm El Niño year and finish with a cool La Niña year, then naturally it's going to understate atmospheric warming significantly, as heat leaves the oceans at the start and returns to the oceans at the end.

      Thinking that some models should have forecast a cooling over the period to balance all the ones forecasting a warming is just silly. That sort of model, with rising CO2 levels causing global cooling, would fail over the long term.

      Georgie,

      I don't know whether Professor Allen said what you've quoted. But no scientist would disagree. Science is always provisional. He did write a comment on David Rose's article on the Daily Mail's website disputing Rose's interpretation of Allen's comments.

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    6. Egnor:

      Question:

      It is not only remarkable that all of the computer models on AGW were wrong. It is remarkable that all of the models were wrong in the same direction.

      Models that are wrong for innocent reasons are just as likely to underestimate effects as overestimate effects.


      Not necessarily. The models may simply not be taking into account the same systematic effect that skews the data in the same direction.

      Case in point: the precession of Mercury's perihelion. Newtonian mechanics predicts the Mercury's perihelion should precess at a rate of 532 arc seconds per century as a result of the gravitational tag by other planets. The observed amount is systematically higher, 574 arc seconds per century. This is clearly a systematic, not a random deviation. Your twisted logic would suggest that this systematic deviation is a result of a vast Newtonian conspiracy (all modelers got it wrong). Of course there is a less conspiratorial explanation: effects of general relativity. They account for the missing 43 arc seconds per century.

      Hoo

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    7. Anonymous

      I encountered John Baez on the forums over a decade ago and pointed out the phony logic of this particular chestnut regarding Mercury.


      GR observed
      Mercury 42.98 43.1 +-0.1

      Earth 3.85 3.84

      Now,if you are a bright spark,you probably notice that a 'precession' value is also given for the Earth which you must subtract from the value given for Mercury to get the true value for Mercury which in turn alters the value for the Earth.You then get into a death spiral where the numbers constantly diminish each time they are altered and the best thing is that you do not need to be an astronomer to spot this type of empirical scam.







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    8. The guys promoting the precession of Mercury and things like that as evidence of 'warped space' may have fooled the wider population for quite some time but the originator of that conception give hilarious reasons for 'warping' space,the fact that the 1920 statement rejects the notion of galaxies makes it all the more hilarious -

      "This view is not in harmony with the theory of Newton. The latter theory rather requires that the universe should have a kind of centre in which the density of the stars is a maximum, and that as we proceed outwards from this centre the group-density of the stars should diminish, until finally, at great distances, it is succeeded by an infinite region of emptiness. The stellar universe ought to be a finite island in the infinite ocean of space.
      This conception is in itself not very satisfactory. It is still less satisfactory because it leads to the result that the light emitted by the stars and also individual stars of the stellar system are perpetually passing out into infinite space, never to return, and without ever again coming into interaction with other objects of nature. Such a finite material universe would be destined to become gradually but systematically impoverished." Einstein

      Most people assume that empirical pronouncements are so complex and subtle that it is not possible to understand them with great effort but nothing could be further from the truth. The great talent to explain complex issues in a simple way to those unfamiliar with conditions or processes is far removed from the empirical attempt to make things sound complicated by using contrived voodoo and that is what you are doing.Mr Egnor is one of those people who has that talent for being able to ease the concern of people who are unfamiliar with complex issues and that means more than a million others who use unfamiliarity with a topic to sound superior.Pascal commented on this wonderful talent that is all too rare,at least in matter of science -

      "True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality; that is to say, the morality of the judgement, which has no rules, makes light of the morality of the intellect.
      For it is to judgement that perception belongs, as science belongs to intellect. Intuition is the part of judgement, mathematics of intellect." Pascal

      Call me a nut if that is what you wish but with all due respect,I wake up on Wednesday 18th Sept as another rotation of the Earth and that is something you and your colleagues refuse to accept.

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  4. In 1677 a grave mistake was made by what was then the Astronomer Royal,in this case,John Flamsteed. This was an era where the main scientific enterprise was finding a way to determine how far East or West a ship was on the ocean and in later years became known as the Longitude problem.

    The error Flamsteed made is directly related to the modeling agendas that followed and especially Newton's attempt to directly link experimental sciences at a human level with dynamics at a celestial scale,something known generally as 'the universal theory of gravitation'.The idea of modeling planetary dynamics using clocks is a late 17th century version of modeling climate using computers by virtue that there are multiple distortions introduced to get the agenda to fly and Galileo in particular warned against drawing conclusions and distorting facts and data to suit that conclusion -

    "I know; such men do not deduce their conclusion from its
    premises or establish it by reason, but they accommodate (I should have said discommode and distort) the premises and reasons to a conclusion which for them is already established and nailed down. No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous. " Galileo

    In brief,Flamsteed lunged at a conclusion that the stellar circumpolar return of a star to the same spot each night proves that the rotation of the Earth is constant -

    "... our clocks kept so good a correspondence with the Heavens that I doubt it not but they would prove the revolutions of the Earth to be isochronical... " John Flamsteed

    The fact is that it doesn't,the Earth turns once in 24 hours and all the effects experienced by the body within a 24 hour period is in response to one rotation of the planet along with temperature rises and falls and daylight turning to darkness. The 24 hour AM/PM system in tandem with the Lat/Long system generates an equatorial speed of 1037.5 miles per hour hence the Earth turns its full 24901 mile circumference in 24 hours.

    So,Flamsteed's conclusion is that the Earth turns once in 23 hours 56 minutes 04 seconds and that there is a mismatch between one 24 hour day and one rotation of the Earth, something which should shock all people but unfortunately it doesn't.

    It short,it is modeling itself that is responsible for what is effectively a grotesque Punch and Judy circus arising from a vicious strain of empiricism that arose in the late 17th century,a strain that only a rare type of individual can spot let alone deal with.One of them was the brilliant Von Humboldt -

    "This assemblage of imperfect dogmas bequeathed by one age to another— this physical philosophy, which is composed of popular prejudices,—is not only injurious because it perpetuates error with the obstinacy engendered by the evidence of ill observed facts, but also because it hinders the mind from attaining to higher views of nature. Instead of seeking to discover the mean or medium point, around which oscillate, in apparent independence of forces, all the phenomena of the external world, this system delights in multiplying exceptions to the law, and seeks, amid phenomena and in organic forms, for something beyond the marvel of a regular succession, and an internal and progressive development. Ever inclined to believe that the order of nature is disturbed, it refuses to recognise in the present any analogy with the past, and guided by its own varying hypotheses, seeks at hazard, either in the interior of the globe or in the regions of space, for the cause of these pretended perturbations. It is the special object of the present work to combat those errors which derive their source from a vicious empiricism and from imperfect inductions." Von Humboldt ,Kosmos

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    1. Gerald Kelleher: "So,Flamsteed's conclusion is that the Earth turns once in 23 hours 56 minutes 04 seconds and that there is a mismatch between one 24 hour day and one rotation of the Earth, something which should shock all people but unfortunately it doesn't."

      Is this some kind of a joke? The period of Earth's rotation about its axis is quite precisely measured. It is 86,164.09053083288 seconds, or 23h 56m 4.09053083288 s. Which agrees with the above number.

      Hoo

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    2. It is my pleasure to inform you that the 24 hour AM/PM system in tandem with the Lat/Long system contains all the information you need to conclude that the Earth turns once each 24 hour day,one hundred times in 100 days and on it goes.

      I quite understand how Flamsteed was in error and indeed it does indeed take some explaining but I assure you that rotations of the Earth and the 24 hour cycle never fall out of step hence the temperature rises and falls daily in response to one rotation of the Earth and all life with it. Flamsteed's flawed conclusion becomes obvious via the insistence of 1465 rotations in 1461 days or 4 phantom rotations the Earth simply does not have -

      "The Earth spins on its axis about 366 and 1/4 times each year, but there are only 365 and 1/4 days per year." NASA

      http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970714.html

      Much like the emergence of computers in our era and the disruptive mischief created by mathematical modelers in respect to climate,the late 17th century attempt to model the motions of the Earth using a clock threw up that odd value you indicate along with the fiction of a 'solar vs sidereal day'.

      Lately they have tried to jettison that 'solar vs sidereal' fiction for an altogether new fiction where they introduce a non astronomical assertion -

      "At the time of the dinosaurs, Earth completed one rotation in about 23 hours," says MacMillan, who is a member of the VLBI team at NASA Goddard. "In the year 1820, a rotation took exactly 24 hours, or 86,400 standard seconds. Since 1820, the mean solar day has increased by about 2.5 milliseconds." NASA

      So instead of the old 2+2=5 conclusion created in the late 17th century they now have 2+2=4.002.In geometric and astronomical terms it is the equivalent of going from 'global warming' to 'climate change' when things didn't pan out with data.

      The ground zero is where interpretative science was supplanted by the speculative/predictive agendas originating in Newton's use of Flamsteed's Equatorial Coordinate System in an attempt to bridge the divide between experimental sciences and planetary dynamics.

      There is an argument here that goes back to the Galileo affair in that one of the main talking points was whether the system which predicts things like lunar/solar eclipses,transits and things like that could also prove the Earth's motions and that is far removed from the convenient anti-faith belief that the Church required the Earth to be the center -

      "Here lurked the danger of serious misunderstanding. Maffeo Barberini, while he was a Cardinal, had counselled Galileo to treat Copernicanism as a hypothesis, not as a confirmed truth. But ‘hypothesis’ meant two very different things. On the one hand, astronomers were assumed to deal only with hypotheses, i.e. accounts of the observed motions of the stars and planets that were not claimed to be true. Astronomical theories were mere instruments for calculation and prediction, a view that is often called ‘instrumentalism’. On the other hand, a hypothesis could also be understood as a theory that was not yet proved but was open to eventual confirmation. This was a ‘realist’ position. Galileo thought that Copernicanism was true, and presented it as a hypothesis, i.e. as a provisional idea that was potentially physically true, and he discussed the pros and cons, leaving the issue undecided. This did not correspond to the instrumentalist view of Copernicanism that was held by Maffeo Barberini and others. They thought that Copernicus’ system was a purely instrumental device, and Maffeo Barberini was convinced that it could never be proved. This ambiguity pervaded the whole Galileo Affair."

      It is exceptionally difficult to keep the focus on modeling without widening the technical and historical details however the core conclusion which drove Newton's predictive agenda that tried to link the fall of an apple with the motions of celestial objects is fatally flawed.

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    3. Egnor, you attract interesting crackpots to your blog. This specimen looks pretty interesting.

      Hoo

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    4. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavySeptember 17, 2013 at 2:25 PM

      Well, at least I know now why my damn watch is always wrong.

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    5. Anonymous

      Unless you believe that clocks grow on trees and that the 24 hour AM/PM system and the Lat/Long system was conjured out of thin air,I suggest you listen to the great innovator John Harrison who created the first really accurate watches based on rotation once in 24 hours -

      "The application of a Timekeeper to this discovery is founded upon the following principles: the earth's surface is divided into 360 equal parts (by imaginary lines drawn from North to South) which are called
      Degrees of Longitude; and its daily revolution Eastward round its own axis is performed in 24 hours; consequently in that period, each of those imaginary lines or degrees, becomes successively opposite to the Sun (which makes the noon or precise middle of the day at each of those degrees;) and it must follow, that from the time any one of those lines passes the Sun, till the next passes, must be just four minutes, for 24 hours being divided by 360 will give that quantity; so that for every degree of Longitude we sail Westward, it will be noon with us four minutes the later, and for every degree Eastward four minutes the sooner, and so on in proportion for any greater or less quantity. Now, the exact time of the day at the place where we are, can be ascertained by well known and easy observations of the Sun if
      visible for a few minutes at any time from his being ten degrees high until within an hour of noon, or from an hour after noon until he is only 10 degrees high in the afternoon; if therefore, at any time when
      such observation is made, a Timekeeper tells us at the same moment what o'clock it is at the place we sailed from, our Longitude is clearly discovered." John Harrison

      The hyperfuss over 'global warming' is a mere symptom of a bigger underlying problem that originates with an exceptionally dumb conclusion.

      When denominational Christianity dumped its astronomical heritage after the Galileo affair and set in motion this phony division between science and religion,it effectively cut off the ability to discern the connection between the individual and Universal in physical terms.From the time of Newton and his followers,the celestial arena has been turned into a theoretical junkyard with little more than contrived voodoo passed off as substance to the unwary wider population.

      How the system where days/years transfer into rotations/orbital circuits is one of humanity's greatest treasures but it isn't going to be appreciated by people who refuse to accept that the Earth turns once in 24 hours.

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    6. Hold on to your hats, gentlemen, we are in for a real treat! This Kelleher fellow is a real nut. Google him.

      Hoo

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    8. The notion of 'Global warming' is merely a symptom of a disease that formally entered science in the late 17th century so while there are many who imagine that treating the symptoms will deal with the wayward notion that humans can control the planet's temperature within a certain range but the truth is that it doesn't deal with the underlying cause commonly known as the 'scientific method'.On the plus side,the aggressive behavior of modelers in respect to climate did reveal the core ideology of empiricism which is anti-faith in nature and cannot be otherwise.

      Only a few have ever questioned the foundations of the speculative/predictive agenda of empiricism which is built on the expense of genuine astronomy by chanting voodoo and hoping nobody will notice or be frightened into accepting the ideology for fear of looking stupid.

      "To explain: The Newtonian Gravity -- a law of Nature -- a law whose existence as such no one out of Bedlam questions -- a law whose admission as such enables us to account for nine-tenths of the Universal phaenomena -- a law which, merely because it does so enable us to account for these phaenomena, we are perfectly willing, without reference to any other considerations, to admit, and cannot help admitting, as a law -- a law, nevertheless, of which neither the principle nor the modus operandi of the principle, has ever yet been traced by the human analysis -- a law, in short, which, neither in its detail nor in its generality, has been found susceptible of explanation at all -- is at length seen to be at every point thoroughly explicable, provided we only yield our assent to -- what? To an hypothesis? Why if an hypothesis -- if the merest hypothesis -- if an hypothesis for whose assumption -- as in the case of that pure hypothesis the Newtonian law itself -- no shadow of a priori reason could be assigned -- if an hypothesis, even so absolute as all this implies, would enable us to perceive a principle for the Newtonian law -- would enable us to understand as satisfied, conditions so miraculously -- so ineffably complex and seemingly irreconcileable as those involved in the relations of which Gravity tells us, -- what rational being Could so expose his fatuity as to call even this absolute hypothesis an hypothesis any longer -- unless, indeed, he were to persist in so calling it, with the understanding that he did so, simply for the sake of consistency in words?" Edgar Allan Poe

      In short,it doesn't matter if there are heatwaves or severe cold spells,droughts or floods,everything can be explained by 'global warming' much like empiricists appeal to 'Newtonian gravity' to explain everything and anything.

      I understood early on that empiricists didn't understand their own system,they like the voodoo surrounding Newton's agenda but none of the substance and what he tried to do but I assure them that I do.

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  5. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavySeptember 17, 2013 at 2:48 PM

    Hoots toots: "Case in point: the precession of Mercury's perihelion."

    True, as far as it goes. But it an inapt response to the gist of Egnor's point.

    First, there was no cadre of squalling Hermetics accusing those who noted the "anomaly" of being "deniers" with "twisted" logic in thrall to Big Astronomy.

    Second, there was no derivatives trading desk (e.g., the Chicago Climate Exchange) or hedge fund (e.g., Generation Investment Management) that stood to lose millions of dollars if the "anomaly" turned out to be real and billions of dollars in government subsidy and regulatory rent went up in smoke.

    Hoots also toots: "Science that has no puzzles to solve is a dead science. It's engineering."

    Ask the engineers working on the ITER tokamak project, Hoots. In fact, every engineer I ever employed knew more about just about any technical matter than you appear to know. Perhaps it's your phlogiston-driven computer display. Or your technical sources like jezebel.com for the big-time twitterology research.

    Hoots says: "Allen is completely right about that."

    Glad to know you aren't a Gorpuscle.

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