32 ms·

Why I decided not to enter the $100k global warming time-series challenge

117 points by aaronchall 11y ago

coherentpony 11y ago
The first lesson in any experiment is to understand the question you're answering. This is a great example of that.
zump 11y ago
Andrew Gelman is a wizard
threeseed 11y ago
Those who believe in climate change should just reframe the argument in the face of skeptics. Just say, "you're right, we don't know the science is true but just like people/companies take out insurance in situations of risk so should we." Because when the problem is reframed as an exercise in risk mitigation then it is very hard to argue against. Especially when said activities have not been shown to have a measurable impact on the world's economic activity. In fact huge benefits will come if we invent largely free energy.
- codezero 11y ago
  Not a bad way to put it. I've always wondered why framing things this way doesn't work: the things people claim cause global warming, whether or not they have anything to do with global warming, are on their own not sustainable, and will likely lead to long term suffering for humanity, so we should find ways to reduce them and find more sustainable ways of living.
  - briandear 11y ago
    The odd thing is that what we're doing has been "sustainable" since the Industrial Revolution. I am honestly interested in what "sustainable" actually means. It would seem that nothing is truly sustainable. I should like to see evidence of what actually is and isn't sustainable because from my chair, "sustainable" isn't wel defined. Dinosaurs lived in a sustainable environment and yet, here we are. My feeling is that the sense of emergent disaster is manufactured by those with vested political and financial interests. Progress in things like energy, manufacturing, etc., is welcome and naturally occurs as a function of a free market and a desire to achieve a competitive advantage. However, this 'end is near' cult that would have us believe the ice caps would have been gone by now and island nations would have disappeared. We've had a grand total of .36 degrees warming over the past 100 years. The climate is changing -- but not that much: not enough to warrant 50,000 people jetting off to Paris to talk about it on the taxpayers' dime. Let's improve industrial processes to eliminate toxic pollution (you know, real pollution -- things like Benzene and Mercury and 2.5 particulates,) and stop wasting everyone's collective time with Chicken Little exploitations of the politically active, but stupid masses of people that seem to think their kids will become scrambled eggs on the sidewalk if they don't recycle that plastic bottle immediately. There are people that actually believe Chinese smog is from CO2! It's depressing how incredibly wrong public opinion often is due to well placed agitators with a PhD after their name and a bank account full of grant funds.
    - Angostura 11y ago
      > The odd thing is that what we're doing has been "sustainable" since the Industrial Revolution. You then go on to set out how you're not sure what sustainable means. So let me see if I can help. A simple guide would be that resource is being used in a sustainable way if the resource isn't being used up faster than it is replenished, or in other words 'If we keep doing this, can we keep doing this for a long time?' So by that measure, solar power, wind, geo-thermal are sustainable - the fact that we use them, doesn't diminish the amount available. To an extent cutting down a tree and burning is sustainable, if you can grow trees fast enough. Fossil fuels aren't sustainable. Firstly, there is a finite amount in the ground, and the speed at which we extract it far, far outweighs the speed at which new deposits are being laid down. Secondly, we need to use the atmosphere as the dumping ground for fossil fuels' waste products - including CO2. The atmosphere isn't infinite and we can measure that CO2 concentrations are rising in line with our output. Clearly, this is a simplified explanation, but I hope it is helpful. It does illustrate that no, we haven't being using resources in a sustainable fashion since the industrial revolution. Just because something hasn't run out yet, doesn't mean than it has been used sustainably. Finally - sustainable resource use isn't a magic get out of jail free card. Yes, the dinosaur ecosystem was sustainable. That doesn't mean that they were immune from meteor strikes. > My feeling is that the sense of emergent disaster is manufactured by those with vested political and financial interests. My feeling is that if you looked into the actual science a bit, your feeling may change.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
      > However, this 'end is near' cult that would have us believe the ice caps would have been gone by now and island nations would have disappeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise How about you just ignore the cult and look at what actual scientists have to say? You are mostly displaying complete lack of clue, just as some of the cultists. > There are people that actually believe Chinese smog is from CO2! Yes, the world is full of idiots, big deal. That doesn't mean that there aren't some quite good scientists who have some pretty convincing measurements of what is happening right now to offer, and who certainly don't expect CO2 to form a fog or whatever in our atmosphere.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  Saying that climate scientists should qualify their findings using risk & mitigation models is like telling an olympic athlete that they should train if they want to win gold. Not only do they know, not only have they been doing it all along, but they have invested such monumental effort in doing an extraordinarily good job of it all along that the fact that you aren't aware is depressing. Doubly so because, in contrast to athletics, the point of the exercise wasn't to win a contest but rather to achieve the very public awareness that, evidently, they haven't. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/
  - logical42 11y ago
    I don't think the commenter is saying that climate scientists should rephrase their findings using risk & mitigation models.. at least not the way I understand that comment.
  - jedharris 11y ago
    To me the comment says "Shift the argument from 'Are we sure climate change will happen?' to 'How much insurance against climate change should we buy?'" However much expertise has been invested in risk analysis, I don't see the public debate being framed in terms of risk analysis. Maybe this is an example of the level of skill in the PR campaign for denialism -- no need to win the argument if you can just get it framed the way you want.
    - js8 11y ago
      > to 'How much insurance against climate change should we buy?' What does it mean? To buy insurance from whom? If you're asking about what is by many scientists considered to be a long-term safe CO2 level, then the answer is 350 ppm. Which we already blew through.
- vixen99 11y ago
  'Said activities' are having & will have an enormous impact on the world's poor. This is not necessarily a conclusive argument against undertaking them (if survival is at stake) but a balanced view of the kind we don't get is needed. The language used is that of religious fervour with talk of 'denial', and 'sceptics' - as if reasoned scepticism isn't the basis of how science progresses. ("Conjecture and refutation- Karl Popper" anyone?) My point is not to argue against CAGW but to bemoan the lack of any calm appraisal of pros and cons. A response to risk mitigation is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Lda06iK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Lda06iK0 where the thesis is based on figures accepted by the IPCC and Lord Stern. I've not seen a sensible rebuttal. No one discusses the massive increase in the utterly predictable 'greening of the planet' that has and is taking place as a result of the CO2 increase. This translates to $billions in crop production. We only hear of negative effects. Estimates of the lowering of temperature supposedly linked to lowering of emissions after 50-100 years, cite decreases imperceptible to a human and hedged with uncertainties as to their origin and statistical treatment. And so on. Finally, you don’t have to be a climate scientist to note that 1/3 of all emissions of CO2 have occurred since 1970 with no significant increase in global temperature. What do we deduce from this about CAGW? This is a question not a slanted conclusion.
  - archgoon 11y ago
    > Finally, you don’t have to be a climate scientist to note that 1/3 of all emissions of CO2 have occurred since 1970 with no significant increase in global temperature. http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_png http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Instrumental_Tempe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File...
    - vixen99 11y ago
      http://wattsupwiththat.com/global-temperature/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/global-temperature/ All linked back to sources. E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said “the National Climatic Data Center’s procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate,” admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings. “My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means,” Ruedy told the reporter.
- tn13 11y ago
  I am against climate change people because they invariably suggest that the governments should do something. Often this is a good opportunity for the governments to grab more power and take away our freedoms. In my opinion this can bring more misery to humanity than the climate change. For example Indian government is pushing Solar power without must thought. Billions of taxpayer money is being spend on solar panels which we are not sure if they will work. Same amount of money could have produced more energy through conventional means, supported more industry and helped few more million people get out of poverty, I am not sure that by using Solar panels Indian government has saved million people in future. I think a small invention like a floppy disk might have saved more trees that all government efforts put together. Environment might be changing but I would bet on people like Elon Musk any day than the government.
  - Angostura 11y ago
    > I am against climate change people because they invariably suggest that the governments should do something. I'm not sure that you are aware of just how ludicrous, this sounds. Do you have the same complaint when someone's house is burning down and people suggest that firefighters 'should do something'?
    - topynate 11y ago
      Is the purpose of a government to do something about climate change in the same way that the purpose of a firefighter is to do something about a burning house? Why?
      - Angostura 11y ago
        Citizens assign functions to governments that are impractical for individuals or markets to handle. It doesn't make sense for everyone to buy a fire truck and there isn't a good business to be made from putting out fires. A classic case where individuals may band together to invoke government is is where a 'tragedy of the commons' situation is threatened. Left to its own devices, it is perfectly rational in the short term for an individual or business to continue polluting, over-fishing, deforesting or using the atmosphere/oceans as an infinite waste removal resource. In the medium and long term it isn't such a good idea and governments provide the least worst mechanism that we have for citizens to collectively enforce actions that can protect people, society or the environment.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  I think they feel that the science is true, and to say they don't know it's true but let's not take the chance is basically lying, and once you've been rumbled as lying to try to get people to do what you want, you've got zero credibility whether you're talking about the science or risk models or anything.
- djsumdog 11y ago
  Climate change is always the wrong argument. Every piece of legislation that's come up doesn't help solve the actual problem. The problem is pollution, consumerism and planned obsolence. You don't need a new phone every year. Phone should be upgradable, every American city should have trams, intercity rail is much more efficient that cars out buses. Not everyone needs to own a car! Electric cars produce a massive amount of mercury waste in battery production. Reducing carbon emissions is useless if it just means we move to other forms of pollution or out source environmental devastation to China. We need to consume less. Our currently capitalistic world is not sustainable.
  - petke 11y ago
    Its human nature to always want more. Calls for people to conserve more wont work because of this. We have to start taxing pollution so that the external costs are included in the products and services we consume. Then only the few filthy rich will be able to afford a polluting lifestyle.
    - dalke 11y ago
      Do you mean to argue that those who don't want more are not human? Or that a recluse who rejects consumer society, or a practitioner of a minimalist, spartan lifestyle, are still somehow "wanting more"? What would be an example of not wanting more? In a basic sense, everyone wants more food, and water, in order to live, but that's true of all life and not limited to human nature.
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  When an organization is improving processes, they usually look to the most costly inputs first. This is often people or physical equipment but is energy in many industrial processes. If energy becomes "free" there is no economic reason to improve or optimize that input. In fact, there's a good motivation to use more of it - even inefficiently - because it's all multiplied by zero. Therefore, we might end up with systems with great inefficiencies and negative external consequences that are not included in the "free" part.. which leads us exactly back to where we are.
  - hodgesrm 11y ago
    That's a great point. Harry Saunders et al. showed this effect clearly a few years ago with their work on economics of lighting. The thing that screws up green economics is the indirect energy that goes into products like efficient LEDs. [1] (Which I installed in abundance in my house, incidentally. It decreased our electric bills as theory predicted but we also bought more lights and replaced a number of switches and transformers.) [1] http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/why_energy_efficiency_does_not http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/why_energy_efficiency_doe...
- guscost 11y ago
  But if the price of that insurance is to reorganize our entire economy or abandon capitalism altogether, as I hear claimed all the time, that would make it the most expensive insurance product ever offered, by several orders of magnitude. In order to justify that kind of price, it falls on whoever is selling the insurance to demonstrate that this risk is proportionally greater than any of the other risks we typically insure against. Or actually, here's another way to think about it. Due to the global nature of the risk, this insurance is unique in that it requires collective action from everyone. Very different from a typical insurance pool that can work with a smaller group of contributors.
ksrm 11y ago
Reminds me of http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.php http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.php
jessaustin 11y ago
You could say that the above all demonstrates Keenan's point, that you can't identify a trend in a time series of this length. You could, indeed.
- allenlavoie 11y ago
  You could, but you would be wrong, as the remainder of the paragraph you started quoting argues quite convincingly. Fiddle with the free parameters of the contest and it "demonstrates" whatever you want it to.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    That's a fair synopsis of the paragraph, but that understanding only supports "Keenan's point". If "parameter fiddling" is out of bounds, we're back to the drawing board for more climate models.
    - andrewprock 11y ago
      Conflating "climate model" with "parameter fiddling" seems like the more significant logical failure.
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        The first link when one googles "climate model parameter": https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-1-3.html https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-1...
        andrewprock 11y ago
        Nice non-sequitur.
gus_massa 11y ago
I'd like to see a graph of the histogram with the three Gaussians superimposed. In this cases, sigma is bigger than the difference of mu, so the overlap of the Gaussians would be big and the series in the middle would be difficult to classify. This is not as detailed as the analysis in the article, and it doesn´t provide an estimation of the difficulty of the challenge, but it's a nice visual representation of the problem.
zurn 11y ago
What language is that in the code snippet?
- capnrefsmmat 11y ago
  Most of them are R, with some Stan mixed in later.
  - zurn 11y ago
    Thanks. Stan looks interesting! Seems this guy is a major figure in its development too. Link: http://mc-stan.org/ http://mc-stan.org/ ("Stan is a probabilistic programming language implementing full Bayesian statistical inference ") HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244771
cossatot 11y ago
I think that the best way to go about this would be to home in on the "random" natural variation and really analyze the noise. Random noise should have very different spectral characteristics than real temperature data, which may have ~decadal periodicity (from the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) or similar non homogeneous frequency content. But with highly down sampled data like this a lot could be lost. That being said this is basically a Turing test with snippets of conversation selected by an antagonistic mediator. As Gelman has shown, the expected ROI is very low and any climate scientist worth her salt is better off using that effort in the grant proposal contest instead; more money and better odds.
andrewprock 11y ago
It turns out the fellow who posted the challenge is a crank. Not surprising that it is negative expected value.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Non sequitur! Most lotteries and similar contests have negative expected values. The house always wins!

117 points by aaronchall 11y ago

coherentpony 11y ago

The first lesson in any experiment is to understand the question you're answering. This is a great example of that.

zump 11y ago

Andrew Gelman is a wizard

threeseed 11y ago

Those who believe in climate change should just reframe the argument in the face of skeptics. Just say, "you're right, we don't know the science is true but just like people/companies take out insurance in situations of risk so should we." Because when the problem is reframed as an exercise in risk mitigation then it is very hard to argue against. Especially when said activities have not been shown to have a measurable impact on the world's economic activity. In fact huge benefits will come if we invent largely free energy.

codezero 11y ago
Not a bad way to put it. I've always wondered why framing things this way doesn't work: the things people claim cause global warming, whether or not they have anything to do with global warming, are on their own not sustainable, and will likely lead to long term suffering for humanity, so we should find ways to reduce them and find more sustainable ways of living.
- briandear 11y ago
  The odd thing is that what we're doing has been "sustainable" since the Industrial Revolution. I am honestly interested in what "sustainable" actually means. It would seem that nothing is truly sustainable. I should like to see evidence of what actually is and isn't sustainable because from my chair, "sustainable" isn't wel defined. Dinosaurs lived in a sustainable environment and yet, here we are. My feeling is that the sense of emergent disaster is manufactured by those with vested political and financial interests. Progress in things like energy, manufacturing, etc., is welcome and naturally occurs as a function of a free market and a desire to achieve a competitive advantage. However, this 'end is near' cult that would have us believe the ice caps would have been gone by now and island nations would have disappeared. We've had a grand total of .36 degrees warming over the past 100 years. The climate is changing -- but not that much: not enough to warrant 50,000 people jetting off to Paris to talk about it on the taxpayers' dime. Let's improve industrial processes to eliminate toxic pollution (you know, real pollution -- things like Benzene and Mercury and 2.5 particulates,) and stop wasting everyone's collective time with Chicken Little exploitations of the politically active, but stupid masses of people that seem to think their kids will become scrambled eggs on the sidewalk if they don't recycle that plastic bottle immediately. There are people that actually believe Chinese smog is from CO2! It's depressing how incredibly wrong public opinion often is due to well placed agitators with a PhD after their name and a bank account full of grant funds.
  - Angostura 11y ago
    > The odd thing is that what we're doing has been "sustainable" since the Industrial Revolution. You then go on to set out how you're not sure what sustainable means. So let me see if I can help. A simple guide would be that resource is being used in a sustainable way if the resource isn't being used up faster than it is replenished, or in other words 'If we keep doing this, can we keep doing this for a long time?' So by that measure, solar power, wind, geo-thermal are sustainable - the fact that we use them, doesn't diminish the amount available. To an extent cutting down a tree and burning is sustainable, if you can grow trees fast enough. Fossil fuels aren't sustainable. Firstly, there is a finite amount in the ground, and the speed at which we extract it far, far outweighs the speed at which new deposits are being laid down. Secondly, we need to use the atmosphere as the dumping ground for fossil fuels' waste products - including CO2. The atmosphere isn't infinite and we can measure that CO2 concentrations are rising in line with our output. Clearly, this is a simplified explanation, but I hope it is helpful. It does illustrate that no, we haven't being using resources in a sustainable fashion since the industrial revolution. Just because something hasn't run out yet, doesn't mean than it has been used sustainably. Finally - sustainable resource use isn't a magic get out of jail free card. Yes, the dinosaur ecosystem was sustainable. That doesn't mean that they were immune from meteor strikes. > My feeling is that the sense of emergent disaster is manufactured by those with vested political and financial interests. My feeling is that if you looked into the actual science a bit, your feeling may change.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
    > However, this 'end is near' cult that would have us believe the ice caps would have been gone by now and island nations would have disappeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise How about you just ignore the cult and look at what actual scientists have to say? You are mostly displaying complete lack of clue, just as some of the cultists. > There are people that actually believe Chinese smog is from CO2! Yes, the world is full of idiots, big deal. That doesn't mean that there aren't some quite good scientists who have some pretty convincing measurements of what is happening right now to offer, and who certainly don't expect CO2 to form a fog or whatever in our atmosphere.
jjoonathan 11y ago
Saying that climate scientists should qualify their findings using risk & mitigation models is like telling an olympic athlete that they should train if they want to win gold. Not only do they know, not only have they been doing it all along, but they have invested such monumental effort in doing an extraordinarily good job of it all along that the fact that you aren't aware is depressing. Doubly so because, in contrast to athletics, the point of the exercise wasn't to win a contest but rather to achieve the very public awareness that, evidently, they haven't. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/
- logical42 11y ago
  I don't think the commenter is saying that climate scientists should rephrase their findings using risk & mitigation models.. at least not the way I understand that comment.
- jedharris 11y ago
  To me the comment says "Shift the argument from 'Are we sure climate change will happen?' to 'How much insurance against climate change should we buy?'" However much expertise has been invested in risk analysis, I don't see the public debate being framed in terms of risk analysis. Maybe this is an example of the level of skill in the PR campaign for denialism -- no need to win the argument if you can just get it framed the way you want.
  - js8 11y ago
    > to 'How much insurance against climate change should we buy?' What does it mean? To buy insurance from whom? If you're asking about what is by many scientists considered to be a long-term safe CO2 level, then the answer is 350 ppm. Which we already blew through.
vixen99 11y ago
'Said activities' are having & will have an enormous impact on the world's poor. This is not necessarily a conclusive argument against undertaking them (if survival is at stake) but a balanced view of the kind we don't get is needed. The language used is that of religious fervour with talk of 'denial', and 'sceptics' - as if reasoned scepticism isn't the basis of how science progresses. ("Conjecture and refutation- Karl Popper" anyone?) My point is not to argue against CAGW but to bemoan the lack of any calm appraisal of pros and cons. A response to risk mitigation is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Lda06iK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Lda06iK0 where the thesis is based on figures accepted by the IPCC and Lord Stern. I've not seen a sensible rebuttal. No one discusses the massive increase in the utterly predictable 'greening of the planet' that has and is taking place as a result of the CO2 increase. This translates to $billions in crop production. We only hear of negative effects. Estimates of the lowering of temperature supposedly linked to lowering of emissions after 50-100 years, cite decreases imperceptible to a human and hedged with uncertainties as to their origin and statistical treatment. And so on. Finally, you don’t have to be a climate scientist to note that 1/3 of all emissions of CO2 have occurred since 1970 with no significant increase in global temperature. What do we deduce from this about CAGW? This is a question not a slanted conclusion.
- archgoon 11y ago
  > Finally, you don’t have to be a climate scientist to note that 1/3 of all emissions of CO2 have occurred since 1970 with no significant increase in global temperature. http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_png http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Instrumental_Tempe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File...
  - vixen99 11y ago
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/global-temperature/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/global-temperature/ All linked back to sources. E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said “the National Climatic Data Center’s procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate,” admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings. “My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means,” Ruedy told the reporter.
tn13 11y ago
I am against climate change people because they invariably suggest that the governments should do something. Often this is a good opportunity for the governments to grab more power and take away our freedoms. In my opinion this can bring more misery to humanity than the climate change. For example Indian government is pushing Solar power without must thought. Billions of taxpayer money is being spend on solar panels which we are not sure if they will work. Same amount of money could have produced more energy through conventional means, supported more industry and helped few more million people get out of poverty, I am not sure that by using Solar panels Indian government has saved million people in future. I think a small invention like a floppy disk might have saved more trees that all government efforts put together. Environment might be changing but I would bet on people like Elon Musk any day than the government.
- Angostura 11y ago
  > I am against climate change people because they invariably suggest that the governments should do something. I'm not sure that you are aware of just how ludicrous, this sounds. Do you have the same complaint when someone's house is burning down and people suggest that firefighters 'should do something'?
  - topynate 11y ago
    Is the purpose of a government to do something about climate change in the same way that the purpose of a firefighter is to do something about a burning house? Why?
    - Angostura 11y ago
      Citizens assign functions to governments that are impractical for individuals or markets to handle. It doesn't make sense for everyone to buy a fire truck and there isn't a good business to be made from putting out fires. A classic case where individuals may band together to invoke government is is where a 'tragedy of the commons' situation is threatened. Left to its own devices, it is perfectly rational in the short term for an individual or business to continue polluting, over-fishing, deforesting or using the atmosphere/oceans as an infinite waste removal resource. In the medium and long term it isn't such a good idea and governments provide the least worst mechanism that we have for citizens to collectively enforce actions that can protect people, society or the environment.
EliRivers 11y ago
I think they feel that the science is true, and to say they don't know it's true but let's not take the chance is basically lying, and once you've been rumbled as lying to try to get people to do what you want, you've got zero credibility whether you're talking about the science or risk models or anything.
djsumdog 11y ago
Climate change is always the wrong argument. Every piece of legislation that's come up doesn't help solve the actual problem. The problem is pollution, consumerism and planned obsolence. You don't need a new phone every year. Phone should be upgradable, every American city should have trams, intercity rail is much more efficient that cars out buses. Not everyone needs to own a car! Electric cars produce a massive amount of mercury waste in battery production. Reducing carbon emissions is useless if it just means we move to other forms of pollution or out source environmental devastation to China. We need to consume less. Our currently capitalistic world is not sustainable.
- petke 11y ago
  Its human nature to always want more. Calls for people to conserve more wont work because of this. We have to start taxing pollution so that the external costs are included in the products and services we consume. Then only the few filthy rich will be able to afford a polluting lifestyle.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Do you mean to argue that those who don't want more are not human? Or that a recluse who rejects consumer society, or a practitioner of a minimalist, spartan lifestyle, are still somehow "wanting more"? What would be an example of not wanting more? In a basic sense, everyone wants more food, and water, in order to live, but that's true of all life and not limited to human nature.
caseysoftware 11y ago
When an organization is improving processes, they usually look to the most costly inputs first. This is often people or physical equipment but is energy in many industrial processes. If energy becomes "free" there is no economic reason to improve or optimize that input. In fact, there's a good motivation to use more of it - even inefficiently - because it's all multiplied by zero. Therefore, we might end up with systems with great inefficiencies and negative external consequences that are not included in the "free" part.. which leads us exactly back to where we are.
- hodgesrm 11y ago
  That's a great point. Harry Saunders et al. showed this effect clearly a few years ago with their work on economics of lighting. The thing that screws up green economics is the indirect energy that goes into products like efficient LEDs. [1] (Which I installed in abundance in my house, incidentally. It decreased our electric bills as theory predicted but we also bought more lights and replaced a number of switches and transformers.) [1] http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/why_energy_efficiency_does_not http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/why_energy_efficiency_doe...
guscost 11y ago
But if the price of that insurance is to reorganize our entire economy or abandon capitalism altogether, as I hear claimed all the time, that would make it the most expensive insurance product ever offered, by several orders of magnitude. In order to justify that kind of price, it falls on whoever is selling the insurance to demonstrate that this risk is proportionally greater than any of the other risks we typically insure against. Or actually, here's another way to think about it. Due to the global nature of the risk, this insurance is unique in that it requires collective action from everyone. Very different from a typical insurance pool that can work with a smaller group of contributors.

ksrm 11y ago

Reminds me of http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.php http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.php

jessaustin 11y ago

You could say that the above all demonstrates Keenan's point, that you can't identify a trend in a time series of this length. You could, indeed.

allenlavoie 11y ago
You could, but you would be wrong, as the remainder of the paragraph you started quoting argues quite convincingly. Fiddle with the free parameters of the contest and it "demonstrates" whatever you want it to.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  That's a fair synopsis of the paragraph, but that understanding only supports "Keenan's point". If "parameter fiddling" is out of bounds, we're back to the drawing board for more climate models.
  - andrewprock 11y ago
    Conflating "climate model" with "parameter fiddling" seems like the more significant logical failure.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      The first link when one googles "climate model parameter": https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-1-3.html https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-1...
      - andrewprock 11y ago
        Nice non-sequitur.

gus_massa 11y ago

I'd like to see a graph of the histogram with the three Gaussians superimposed. In this cases, sigma is bigger than the difference of mu, so the overlap of the Gaussians would be big and the series in the middle would be difficult to classify. This is not as detailed as the analysis in the article, and it doesn´t provide an estimation of the difficulty of the challenge, but it's a nice visual representation of the problem.

zurn 11y ago

What language is that in the code snippet?

capnrefsmmat 11y ago
Most of them are R, with some Stan mixed in later.
- zurn 11y ago
  Thanks. Stan looks interesting! Seems this guy is a major figure in its development too. Link: http://mc-stan.org/ http://mc-stan.org/ ("Stan is a probabilistic programming language implementing full Bayesian statistical inference ") HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244771

cossatot 11y ago

I think that the best way to go about this would be to home in on the "random" natural variation and really analyze the noise. Random noise should have very different spectral characteristics than real temperature data, which may have ~decadal periodicity (from the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) or similar non homogeneous frequency content. But with highly down sampled data like this a lot could be lost. That being said this is basically a Turing test with snippets of conversation selected by an antagonistic mediator. As Gelman has shown, the expected ROI is very low and any climate scientist worth her salt is better off using that effort in the grant proposal contest instead; more money and better odds.

andrewprock 11y ago

It turns out the fellow who posted the challenge is a crank. Not surprising that it is negative expected value.

jessaustin 11y ago
Non sequitur! Most lotteries and similar contests have negative expected values. The house always wins!