Re: Physicists = with the glaivin and the hoiting and the yelling.

RichL wrote:
Les Cargill <lcargill@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
RichL wrote:
Les Cargill <lcargill@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
RichL wrote:
Lord Valve <detritus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
RichL wrote:
<snip>
See, here's the thing Willie. I read all this stuff with a degree
of skepticism, regardless of which side of the debate they come
from. Plus, I've got a leg up on most folks simply because I've
been trained in the physics that underlies the debate. Of course
the general public doesn't have that advantage but they still have
the ability to question and remain skeptical and not adopt a
position simply because it's the one advocated by "their team".
If it is indeed physics, that's one thing. But you're talking
about people reading tea leaves on the output of *models*, Rich.
Models in and of themselves are neither intrinsically good or
intrinsically bad. It all depends on the *completeness* of what goes
in.

SPICE models, for instance, are generally pretty safe territory since
the underlying physics of the individual devices are well understood.

I could not provide a better example of something with
serious limitations. Well, I could...

???
Provide you don't exceed the limits over which the individual device
models have been demonstrated to be valid, you're fine. The problems
occur when you expect to get more out of it than what you put in.


Are the limits on the AGW models even known?

<snip good stuff because there's only so much time in the day to discuss
it>


Mark it and leave it for tomorrow - that's what I do when I busy up.

Well, at present, Doing Something (tm) means throwing a really big -
and I mean *really* big - load on another extremely
sensitive-on-initial-conditions system - the economy.

Yeah, but there's another field of human endeavor for which modeling
raises questions, as far as I'm concerned the experimental validation of
modeling (and economics as "science") is on even less firm ground than
global climate change.


Of course. Parts of economics are falsifiable, but it's a social
science, so....

So here's what you do (it's all pie in the sky as far as any realistic
implementation is concerned but we're all armchair policymakers anyway
so what the hey...):

Start tweaking things, little by little, and watch the response of the
"system". The bill recently passed by the House is really a small step
in this direction, alarmists notwithstanding. You're looking to
optimize *something*, the presumption being that a little bit of
intervention is better than nothing but you don't know what the
"break-even" point is in terms of the global economic condition is at
some predetermined point down the road.


This is true, and the only saving grace of W-M. But now you have
an AGW bureaucracy, the sort of which Jerry Pournelle has an Iron
Law about.

Of course this requires unprecedented international cooperation to avoid
stacking the deck against ourselves in terms of economic disadvantage.

You cannot say "hay, peepuls! LOLz! We needa test thisshear AGW model,
so plz stop living your life so we kin do it. Kthxbai! My bad for
the famine we caused last month!" Ditto
econ, ditto ... everything.

It also involves being able to separate out changes that occur as a
result of our "tweaks" from the noise, which is fairly high-level.
You've got to develop a methodology by which you can make sensible
extrapolation of observed economic phenomena over large time scales.

It could be a world-wide Manhattan project!

Barring that, why not get some World-Renowned economists involved more
deeply in the global warming debate?




They are. The very basis of cap-and-trade is based on Pigovian
taxation for the management of negative externalities ( based on
how you calculate damages to ag. lang ).

But you know how interdisciplinary stuff goes. If they were *real*
science dewds, they'd be physics guys anyway, amirite?

ObDisclusre: my first physics teacher in college was an associate
prof.... in environmental sci. Phd Physics, he had....

--
Les Cargill
.

Quantcast