About Me
I’ve been commenting in the blogosphere for a number of years and under various handles but finally settled on the Pointman one. The reason I began commenting was that I hated the effect the environmental movement was having on the developing world. A thinly veiled political movement, which is perceived as simply a fashionable lifestyle choice in the developed world, is causing death and misery amongst the eighty percent of humanity not fortunate enough to live well above the poverty line. Its influence and policies prevent the developing nations industrialising and maintain the status quo of keeping them in a state of permanent, grinding, border-line poverty. That is immoral and must be fought. Future historians, especially black African ones, will categorise the effects of the environmental movement as genocidal and they will be correct.
Fighting AGW is an Information War and it’s fought in arenas of public opinion to which the people most harmed by it have absolutely no access. I write, post and comment in an effort to redress that fundamental injustice. My thoughts on blogging and why I blog, are explained in a bit more detail here.
If you want to get in touch, leave a comment to that effect using the email of your choice. Your email address is never published. Your thoughts on anything published here are welcome and they do not have to be in agreement with anything I’ve written but they do have to fall inside the bounds of civility and reasonable commentary. You do not have to register to comment but your first comment will be held for moderation. Thereafter, you can comment freely.
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I’ve added a lot more content to the blog than I’d envisaged being able to do when I started it, so I’d advise you to use the Articles page, the Search facility or the “Tag Cloud” to find pieces on topics you’re interested in.
I’m on Twitter as ThePointmans and Facebook as Pointy Wallawoora but don’t have the time to use them much. Perhaps that’ll change.
Anything more you need to know about me or the blog is here . Cogito.
Regarding “Climate Models”, may I respectfully suggest:
1. They might best be characterized as “Climate Video Games”. I.E., lots of lines of code, flashy output, and about as much relation to the real world as Super Mario.
2. The latest CESM model makes a garbage pile look neat: Imagine taking five separate “models” – sea, land, atmosphere, land ice, and sea ice – setting boundary conditions for each model and running them separately. Taking the resulting outputs as the new boundary conditions and re-running the models, and so on and so on and so on.
Then you claim that any little errors that sneak in will not be magnified along the way.
Then you predict the end of the world.
Then you ask for an increase in next year’s grant money.
3. Has anyone asked whether the people working with “climate models” have any real expertise in Transport Phenomena? Have they ever taken a Transport Phenomena course? Or know what TP are? I suspect the answers are no, no, and maybe.
And by the way, your “Was it hacking” piece was great.
Hello Robert and welcome to the blog. Computer models are useful but only when applied to certain problems. Applying them to complex non-linear systems is inherently pointless but because it’s being done by an almighty computer, the predictions made aquire a specious authority.
Pointman
First, I want to thank you. Your blog is well-written.
Second, a long time ago I watched a show about “computer predictions”. A person believed he could determine the financial value of music–i.e., could predict if a song was going to be a financial hit or a bust. He tried to convince people (record company executives) of his prognostic powers. For the most part, they didn’t believe him. He then decided to present his recommendations as having been made by a computer. He assembled an elaborate array of electronics, including a computer with printer. Songs would be played, the audio signals digitized, the digitized data analyzed by the computer, and the computer’s prognostication of the song’s financial viability sent to a printer. He kept hidden the fact that everything execpt the printer was a ruse. He simply listened to the music, made his assessment of the song’s financial worth, typed his summary, and sent it to the printer. As I recall, lacking complete ingnorance of the “computer decision process” people were considerably more likely to believe “computer predictions” over his personal predictions.
To a large degree, I feel the same way about computer predictions of future climate. Being ignorant of the computer algorithms, the only reason I see for believing computer predictions of future climate is that “trustworthy and knowledgable people” beleive them so I should too. As I see it, there are two problems with accepting this argument. First, although many of the scientists/computer programmers are undoubtedly “trustworthy”, not all are; and the large sums of money available for research have, in my opinion, flooded the process with charlatans. Second, I’m unconvinced at this time that humanity in general, much less any one person or small group of people, possesses the “knowledge” necessary to predict climate 50+ years in the future. Calling people “knowledgable” may on a comparative level (comparable to me) be true; but on an absolute level is far from established. When computer models make many and varied quantifiable predictions of future climate conditions and those predictions come true, then I’ll start paying attention to the models. Until then, I refuse to make drastic changes in mankind’s use of carbon-based energy sources based on “computer predictions”.
There is a posting of Walter Elsasser’s “On the Infra-Red Heat Balance of the Earth”, from 1942 on ScribeD.
This 107 page “magnum opus” presents the “General Radiation Chart”, which has subsequently been used by Meteorologists for the last 68 years (or computerized versions of same) to translate daily “radiosone” P,T, Humidity measurements (0-50,000 Feet) into IR downflux, IR upflux measures. These combined with the solar insolence allow the “weather forecasters” to predict, with some degree of accuracy the daily heat up and cool downs in various regions.
On page 23 of Dr. Elsasser’s work, he explains why…although the IR contributions of CO2 are included in the “governing equations”, as the work progresses, CO2 is dropped out. “For the purposes of the approximation of the chart, the CO2 UpFlux and the CO2 Downflux in the region of the troposphere are considered equal, and therefore not significant.”
Now WHEN CO2 became “controlling”, I’m mystified. Plass and associates in the 1950′s developed charts for the effect of CO2 on STRATOSPHERIC COOLING, as in the stratosphere (above about 36,000′) CO2 is a net OUTFLUX agent.
Max & Robert, I’m not that bothered about where people comment here and I’m not too anal about staying on topic either. Decent commentary and conversations would be what I’m after but not under the ‘about me’ thingy. Hang them under the current article please. Ta.
Pointy