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Indeed in your circumlocutive manner you have described a task akin to building a sand castle one grain of sand at a time. You're getting into the territory of

by rusk 10y ago

Indeed in your circumlocutive manner you have described a task akin to building a sand castle one grain of sand at a time. You're getting into the territory of pascals demon. If you could produce such a sophisticated model why would you even bother with the weather since you'd be able to produce so much more than than that! What you describe sounds quixotic. Tilting at windmills. I would be very disappointed indeed to discover that climate science floundered in the face of trying to do the impossible. The history of innovation is littered with stories of impasse quickly followed by the discovery of a short cut and then progress. It's all about short cuts. When I play chess I don't evaluate all possible moves - when I play poker I don't count the cards. Yet - I can play both quite effectively. How is this? Because dispite my incapability to grasp all the variables I can develop quite sophisticated models with effective predictive power. Nobody expects the sciences to be exhaustive down to the atomic level. Not all sciences are physics. All that is required is a framework into which all extant knowledge can be integrated; methodology for gathering new data and a means to extrapolate predictions. As a software engineer I'm never expected to write x86 assembly language to implement a functioning web site. All I need to do is read a book on HTML look at a few examples online and then off I go. I can probably do a better web site than the guy writing the ASM code for a living. That is what using your NS equations is like for computing your boat hull. Far better off reviewing other people's accounts of what works and putting them together - testing - and seeing if it works. Yes there are a great number of edge cases you may never be able to account for but there are only so many hours in a day and you need to produce something that works for the case in point - not all possible situations. And so it goes with climate science - you can't possibly predict everything to this minutist detail - you can only observe and measure, observe and measure, catalogue, and integrate and continue as infinitum continuously refining your models. Some stuff won't integrate like other stuff but eventually you'll get to a point where you start to have some predictable capacity. By definition this approach can never be "complete" but as we discuss "completeness" isn't possible. But what we do have from our catalogued observations and measurements is a huuuuge body of knowledge about what "actually does happen". Nothing is ever that wildly out of the blue that our existing knowledge and modelling can't have some premonition of it. There are exceptions of course but like we say without doing the impossible it isn't possible to foresee these ... But what we can do is, to within a certain degree of certainty make predictions about what is likely to happen. Like if you're swimming in a lake in Africa or something and you see a shimmering movement on the water do you wait to compute that it's just an agglomeration of leaves? Do you wait to see if it moves with the characteristic vortices of a crocodile or so you just GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WATER straight away? I know which is be doing. Even if it means all my friends laughing at me because sure I'll feel a little bit embarrassed but in the alternative reality where it was a crocodile but I gave up trying to exhaustively model what it was I have died a horrible and brutal death. So as much as I appreciate your educational pedigree and thank you for sharing your valuable time with me I do remain sceptical of your scepticism. Though you have conclusively demonstrated what we cannot know you have said little to explain what we do and our corroborating experiences heretofore. Hope this doesn't come across as too much of a circumlocutive gish gallop I've been trying to type this on my phone on the train without recourse to any notes or any editing capabilities. Sorry 'bout that ;-)

graycat 10y ago
Your view of a lot of the methodology in science, and more so in engineering, is correct or nearly so, and I agree with it nearly so. BUT!!!! So far in saying what human sources of CO2 will do to the temperature of the earth, as in the graph at the link I gave, we're in deep, fuming, reeking, brown sticky stuff -- the predictions from nearly all the models were badly wrong. So, one approach to something better is to return to first principles of physics. History shows that that approach has been known to work. And IIRC by now the Navier-Stokes equations have been quite good for boat hulls and airplane wings. But as I outlined and you noticed, using first principles to say what the temperature of earth will be in 100 years is too difficult, absurdly too difficult, even if ignore turbulence around leaves, too darned difficult -- and it might even be unstable. So, that approach won't work, either. So, as you outlined, we need to find a way that does work. In such a case we will need to check it, test it, validate it, etc. And at this point, from the graphs, no one but 10 year old sweet, cute, darling, adorable but gullible and naive Virginia will believe any testing based on predicting old data and, instead, will want a prediction of the NEXT 20 years and the WAIT 20 years to take the work seriously. Soooo, right, we fall back to some back of the envelope approaches. Here's one such I've already explained here: (1) For CO2, for nearly everything in the record for the past 800,000 years (the geologic time intervals in the lecture seem to be different) shows that temperature went up without preceding CO2 concentrations going up and temperature went down without preceding CO2 concentrations going down. So, net, CO2 is not nearly the only cause of temperature changes. And, since we are now willing to do first cut approximations, we conclude in practical terms that, under anything like current conditions, CO2 is irrelevant. Bluntly, the variations in CO2 concentrations don't match the variations in temperature worth a darn. (2) The stuff I outlined about sun spots fit the temperature data much better. The example that sticks out like sore thumb is the Little Ice Age -- that is, the Maunder Minimum after guy Maunder who noticed that there were nearly no sun spots during the Little Ice Age. Otherwise, so far we don't know even as much as dip squat about the change in temperature, from CO2 or anything else, in the next 100 years. Clearly the first cut, safe bet is that there won't be any change. And, it helps a lot that currently the temperature and the changes in temperature don't look at all unusual. I.e., it was hotter in the Medieval times when people were growing grapes in England. Or, worry about if going to get cancer and f'get about CO2. Sure as heck f'get about carbon taxes.

by rusk 10y ago

graycat 10y ago

Your view of a lot of the methodology in science, and more so in engineering, is correct or nearly so, and I agree with it nearly so. BUT!!!! So far in saying what human sources of CO2 will do to the temperature of the earth, as in the graph at the link I gave, we're in deep, fuming, reeking, brown sticky stuff -- the predictions from nearly all the models were badly wrong. So, one approach to something better is to return to first principles of physics. History shows that that approach has been known to work. And IIRC by now the Navier-Stokes equations have been quite good for boat hulls and airplane wings. But as I outlined and you noticed, using first principles to say what the temperature of earth will be in 100 years is too difficult, absurdly too difficult, even if ignore turbulence around leaves, too darned difficult -- and it might even be unstable. So, that approach won't work, either. So, as you outlined, we need to find a way that does work. In such a case we will need to check it, test it, validate it, etc. And at this point, from the graphs, no one but 10 year old sweet, cute, darling, adorable but gullible and naive Virginia will believe any testing based on predicting old data and, instead, will want a prediction of the NEXT 20 years and the WAIT 20 years to take the work seriously. Soooo, right, we fall back to some back of the envelope approaches. Here's one such I've already explained here: (1) For CO2, for nearly everything in the record for the past 800,000 years (the geologic time intervals in the lecture seem to be different) shows that temperature went up without preceding CO2 concentrations going up and temperature went down without preceding CO2 concentrations going down. So, net, CO2 is not nearly the only cause of temperature changes. And, since we are now willing to do first cut approximations, we conclude in practical terms that, under anything like current conditions, CO2 is irrelevant. Bluntly, the variations in CO2 concentrations don't match the variations in temperature worth a darn. (2) The stuff I outlined about sun spots fit the temperature data much better. The example that sticks out like sore thumb is the Little Ice Age -- that is, the Maunder Minimum after guy Maunder who noticed that there were nearly no sun spots during the Little Ice Age. Otherwise, so far we don't know even as much as dip squat about the change in temperature, from CO2 or anything else, in the next 100 years. Clearly the first cut, safe bet is that there won't be any change. And, it helps a lot that currently the temperature and the changes in temperature don't look at all unusual. I.e., it was hotter in the Medieval times when people were growing grapes in England. Or, worry about if going to get cancer and f'get about CO2. Sure as heck f'get about carbon taxes.