"It may be useful to remember that Christian faith is ultimately dependent upon what actually happened rather than upon the views of historians."
- I. Howard Marshall
Sunday, November 29, 2009
This post is in reference to the leaked CRU emails.
A few notes before I launch into this: first, I am, like you probably are, a huge fan of clean air and clean water. I'm also geeking on new forms of energy, and I'm pretty much "all of the above"; let's develop our domestic supplies, lower (or eliminate) our reliance on foreign oil, develop hydrogen fuel cells, natural gas transportation fleets, wind, solar, geo-thermal, orbital solar arrays, etc. I think that stuff's cool and can only be good.
I also think it's good if we lower our emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere.
We as Christians should be good stewards of this good earth.
And . . . I don't for a moment think that we're heading for a climate disaster. I've been chicken-littled to death during my lifetime. As P.J. O'Rourke once observed, "have you ever wondered if Chicken Little had an agenda?"
One reason for my skepticism has been the reliance of AGW scientists on computer models. I am a computer scientist, and I've seen a lot of bad code in my time. And I've never seen a computer program that can predict the future.
So I was very interested to read this from Michael Williams. This is a view of the issue we're not seeing out there much, but I think it's very important. Question: just how good is the code behind those vaunted climate models?
Up to this point, it was difficult to challenge the conclusions of AGW-believing climate scientists because most geeks don't have much expertise in climatology. We tend to consider ourselves scientists and to give other scientists in other areas of expertise the benefit of the doubt. Without a great deal of experience in climatology, it's hard for a geek to justify spending much time questioning the modes and methods of professional climate researchers.Emphasis mine.
However, the email leak has changed all this. Along with a hoard of emails, some source code for the computer climate models was also hacked and released to the public -- and the source code is an unusable mess. It doesn't take expertise in climatology to look at source code and determine that the code is garbage. There are many more geeks with software expertise than with climate expertise, and the geek community will go through every line of code and likely conclude that the computer models are so flawed that any conclusions drawn on them are without merit.
Despite the liberal tendencies of many geeks, I believe that the source code evidence will be insurmountable for most. Some will continue to cling to AGW because of a devotion to left-wing politics, but the majority of geeks will abandon their belief, and that abandonment by geeks will truly spell the end for AGW.
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Comments on "An Interesting Perspective on Climategate":
3. Bill
- 11/29/2009 6:44 pm CST
Ha ha, Jared.
Ugh. Once more my Texans had me believing they could be great. Then they absolutely fell apart.
My understanding is that VY did it AGAIN, in an even more magnificent way than last week. This is ridiculous - people in Tennessee still not believing?
We coulda drafted him . . .
5. Quaid
- 11/29/2009 7:31 pm CST
Bill - you can watch the VY video on NFL.com. It's worth your time.
As for climate models-
It never occurred to me that the climate-change theories could hinge on things like computer code. I assumed that it was based on collected data and scientists theorizing via certain extrapolations worked out rationally. I didn't realize that they were just plugging all of this data into a computer machine and letting it tell them what to believe based on formulas or algorithms that are seemingly written by people who don't know how to write computer formulas and/or algorithms.
As for this climate debate - can we just put all of this behind us? Can we trash the silly legislation that ramps up government meddling into business? Can we stop flying all over the world to participate in conferences about something that doesn't exist? This issue, more than any other, has been so divisive in our country, over the past several years. More than abortion, immigration, and even the election, this issue has made many people simply apoplectic towards one another. While I agree that we should leave the earth in as good as shape as possible, how do environmentalists show themselves in public right now? Their movement has been set back by a decade, at least.
Republicans have an opportunity here. They can hold all kinds of hearings and we can ask 100 people to testify in Congress, or we can do something. Don't drag this out. Show the legislation for what it is in debate and move on. Let's get our country fixed and forget about this absurd notion that the world will end if we don't do something by . . . Friday. That's it. Friday. If we don't do something by Friday, we're all dead.
Or was it Thursday?
Let me go check that computer model again . . .
6. Bird
- 11/29/2009 10:29 pm CST
Once more my Texans had me believing they could be great. Then they absolutely fell apart.
Welcome to the life of a Houston sports fan. Thankfully, Houston teams usually pull off back-to-back championships every twenty years or so. Of course, those championships are naturally followed by a twenty-year drought.
7. Bob Sacamento
- 11/30/2009 8:35 am CST
Bill,
Amen. Great post.
I would add fission and (in the very long term) fusion energy to your list of "all of the above," but that's about the only thing I saw missing. You pretty much nailed it.
Quaid,
It never occurred to me that the climate-change theories could hinge on things like computer code. I assumed that it was based on collected data and scientists theorizing via certain extrapolations worked out rationally. I didn't realize that they were just plugging all of this data into a computer machine ....
I'll try to be fair to these guys and say that you are overstating the case a bit. "Computational science" (that is, doing science via computers, as opposed to "computer science" which is the science of computers [as if there could ever be such a thing]) is a relatively young field. I have had alot of experience in it, though not in climatology. So, on the one hand, I have seen codes produce astounding successes, but on the other hand, I have seen them produce complete garbage. And not just obvious garbage but the truly dangerous kind -- the kind that looks right at first blush and takes years to truly understand.
The moral is that when you are doing computational science, you get a result and then you go to your experimentalist/observationalist buddies and say, "Do you guys think this is reproducible in the real world?" You don't get a result and then go to the U.N. and say, "We have four years at most to save the planet!!!!"
That's really where the climatologists have failed in my opinion. It's not that they rely on computer models for their results. (They really don't have any other choice.) It's that they got their results and then started screaming about them without waiting for the actual data from real thermometers and anemometers [sic?] and whatnot to come in.
And, by the way, the real data for the past 10 years has been against them.
8. Karl
- 11/30/2009 8:38 am CST
Vince Young looked great. If he keeps playing like that, he'll have to be considered in the top 1/3 of QB's in the league.
But at this point I still think we'll have to wait and see if he becomes a great one, or if he tops out where Michael Vick did (pre dogfighting) - as a dangerous but incomplete QB who can at times can do absolute magic and whose contributions to W's go well beyond the typical QB stat sheet, but who also has enough holes in his game that NFL D's will be able to thwart him from becoming great. Either way, he's sure fun to watch.
9. Shrode
- 11/30/2009 10:21 am CST
Bill, great post.
Two questions.
1 - What does AGW stand for?
2- Have you personally looked at this particular computer code that they are talking about? I'd love to hear your opinion.
This is good info, Bill. Thanks again.
10. Bill
- 11/30/2009 10:33 am CST
Shrode,
AGW stands for "Anthropogenic Global Warming" - i.e., man-made global warning.
I haven't read the code, but I have faith in Michael William's cred (having read him for a long time). From an earlier post of his, here are some of the issues found by one of the people examining the code:
I've examined two files in some depth and found (OK so Harry found some of this)The second, third and fifth items above are especially bad. In my experience, this is often what you get when a scientist (not a programmer) writes a program.
- Inappropriate programming language usage
- Totally nuts shell tricks
- Hard coded constant files
- Incoherent file naming conventions
- Use of program libray subroutines that appear to be far from ideal in how they do things when the work do not produce an answer consistent with other way to calculate the same thing but which fail at undefined times and where when the function fails the the program silently continues without reporting the error
AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!
11. Bill
- 11/30/2009 10:34 am CST
To keep everything in perspective, this is an indictment of some of the climate change predicting code from one research facility.
Leave a Comment:
Beautiful analysis. But relying on geekiness overlooks the kludge factor (computer geeks will especially understand): politics.
Some folks will continue to believe a lie no matter the evidence (ponder, eg, "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" along with consulting Ps 19 or Ro 1). The question before the house is *not* that of how sloppy the science, no matter the magnitude of the decisions we intend to base upon that science. Instead we face a question of what best suits the agenda of those with political power. In short, what will a political plurality (which may be far less than 50.000000001 percent) believe.