Fernando wrote:
data centres!
Not to mention cryptocurrency mining!
Peter wrote:
Organ of the Communist Party of GB
What’s the point of calling someone a communist when they are not?
Interesting interview with former professor Judith Curry:
https://rumble.com/v4gnaec-judith-curry-phd.-in-the-eye-of-the-climate-change-storm.html
Michael_J wrote:
Interesting interview with former professor Judith Curry:
I’m not going to listen to 40+ minutes of video, but from what I read she does not question either that anthropogenic global warming is a reality or that it is potentially disastrous. What she is questioning is the level of certainty of climate models.
Michael_J wrote:
Interesting interview with former professor Judith Curry
41 min video 
who has time to listen to this? Ok, minus first 10 minutes of intro and last 2 minutes of commercial for her new book. Still, almost half an hour… maybe tomorrow when I have more time.
Airborne_Again wrote:
What she is questioning is the level of certainty of climate models.
Having worked with weather models for the last 25 years and having access to people who program them, that is a question which needs asking. Why not, the modellists do that all the time, otherwise we’d see no improvement.
In terms of climate change and the way models are involved in this, even more so, the question needs to be asked and another one too: How “literally” can we take the results of modelling? That is a question every meteorologist asks day after day even on short term modelling, so for long term modelling it is even more relevant.
The issue many people have with the way climate change is communicated and measures demanded stems to a large extent out of the way political agendas have been usurping model outputs to propagate fear and terror rather than scientific probabilities. To an extent that is logical, as scientific probabilities is a field of research that even professionals have trouble with, but at the same time, it is not a good thing when modelling is misused to drive home political positions.
Consequently, the science community has done itself not too many favours with the way they let this happen or even made it happen. As we have seen in other examples, where modelling was used as some sort of oracle/fortune telling to enforce political agendas, this more and more leads to distrust by the general public, which in turn opens the door for propaganda and populism to replace sound scientific research.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The issue many people have with the way climate change is communicated and measures demanded stems to a large extent out of the way political agendas have been usurping model outputs to propagate fear and terror rather than scientific probabilities.
That is a claim I see a lot, but I don’t understand what the “political agenda” would be, as it is clear that most things that need to be done are painful. Politicians generally try to avoid doing painful things for fear of losing the next election. (In democracies, at least.)
What is true is that the necessary actions will demand a high degree of regulation because the free market is incapable of thinking longer than the next quarterly finance report. (I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much.) This will automatically look like an “agenda” to (economic) liberals in particular as regulations are anathema to them. The way out of this cognitive dissonance has frequently been to deny the existence – or at least the significance – of antropogenic global warming.
(In fact, we saw a government change in Sweden after the 2022 election mainly because the winning coalition promised that the climate problem could be solved painlessly – in particular with cheap petrol. What that meant in practise was tearing down the whole of the Swedish strategy to reduce CO2 emissions. Sweden right now has no such strategy. The government claims to have a plan to come up with a new strategy in a couple of years.)
Peter wrote:
The UK has just 2 papers not behind a paywall
According to the BBC series Yes Minister, the UK papers can be categorised as follows:
Airborne_Again wrote:
That is a claim I see a lot, but I don’t understand what the “political agenda” would be, as it is clear that most things that need to be done are painful. Politicians generally try to avoid doing painful things for fear of losing the next election. (In democracies, at least.)
There are two kinds of political agendas. First, some political organizations are hell-bent on certain principles (partially unfounded). For example, in France (and, tragically, in Germany), Green parties have long been strong opponents of nuclear power, solely because “it’s fossil”. Natural gas, on the other hand, is presented as green because it accompanies “renewables” (nuclear and wind, almost exclusively), despite the fact that it produces 5-10x more CO2 / kWh than nuclear. These parties have (or used to have) enormous media coverage and “mind power”: their radical and guilt-creating rhetoric has created somewhat of a self-censorship in media outlets.
Why this agenda exists is beyond me, but I think the power of thinking you have the truth (in a religious-like manner) is extremely strong, it’s a comfortable moral position.
Also, and this leads into the second type of agenda, which comes from some political and economic powers simply trying to pull the strings in their favor. Putin has financed said green parties to make EU nations less sovereign (nuclear) and more dependent on Russia natural gas (renewable intermittence). Big petroleum companies have hidden the climate change for decades (despite in some cases having a lot of evidence).
I do agree that, with democracies focused on the very short term (elections every few years), and general lack of education among the elite (media, politicians, etc.), the lack of a long term plan is much more prominent than any Machiavellian agenda.
Airborne,
I think you answered your own question
Airborne_Again wrote:
Politicians generally try to avoid doing painful things for fear of losing the next election.
True.
If things go well, governments usually don’t loose elections. Hence, anyone trying to kick a working government out, needs to come up with something not well and offer a solution to it. The more radical, the better the chance of success.
That recipe is pretty universal. The main objective is power. The main ingredient is to instill fear to make people follow your ideas.
With regards to climate change, that fear is the “end of the world” as we know it. Hence, the worse the forecasts, the better the reaction. We’ve seen that happen and the result is e.g. the “Ampel” in Germany, with the green party single handedly ruining one of the foremost economies in a single term.
The only problem is: If you constantly use the worst predictions any model can do to boost your credibility and the validity of your argument, you eventually will achieve the opposite. We’ve seen that happen e.g. with Covid and we see it with Climate Change as well.
As for the accuracy of models, when I do “normal” short range forecasting, the model techinque I have come to like is called “ensemble forecasts”. In simplified terms and with the distinct wish to spare you all headaches, ensembles work of the same model running parallel forecasts with minimal deviations in starting points. The result is a range of different results, if you wish a kind of “democratic” model output, where each member of the ensemble draws it’s own conclusions and presents them in a graphic. You then look for the majority and hope for the best. Or, if a majority fails to materialize, you know that whatever you write in the forecast is as likely to happen as not.
So far, I’ve failed to see serious attempts to try this approach in climate modelling or at the very least, if it is done, then the trend is to pick the worst possible outcome and present it as the evangelical Cassandra forecast, mostly because it will generate the most hubbub and most funding. (In other words, a very similar approach to what was done with Covid, but on a more sublime level).
Politicians use this to follow their own goals and usually take what little they do understand of the model outputs and then take the one most suited to their own goals. In other words, those who wish to convert society back to a bicycle community will use the worst ensemble members, those who claim that there is nothing wrong with fossil fuels and own coal plants use the one which sais nothing is happening at all. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but it is not something you’ll ever see out of a politicians statement.
I could go on but I’ll leave it at that.
