What is climate science?

One of my minor ambitions has been to settle on a promising area of climate science and study it in depth. Downloading papers, data, plotting my own graphs and calculating my own stats – that kind of depth. However a problem arose.

What to study?

The more I look at the climate sciences, the more convinced I become that we are not even close to articulating the main climate drivers with their timescales and uncertainties. Well maybe we are getting to know more and more about the uncertainties, but that's the problem.

Although we are accustomed to speak and write of climate science and climate scientist, there are no such beasts. We use the terms as established norms of verbal behaviour, but in my view they do more harm than good. Our global climate is far too complex to be studied within a single discipline and it's time we acknowledged it.

In much the same way we speak of chemistry and chemists when what we really have are specialist chemists working in related areas we place under the umbrella of chemical science.

Unfortunately, sticking with the chemistry analogy, climate science has yet to discover its periodic table. Without something of the kind, some overall theory to justify the term climate science, there is not enough coherence to stitch the various climate sciences together. It is also possible that some climate sciences such as dendroclimatology may become obsolete.

I think a good deal of confusion has arisen from a perception that the climate is a cluster of known scientific laws so the stitching together is already done by those laws. There seems to be a largely covert assumption that all will become clear if only climate scientists select the appropriate data and build models to encapsulate known scientific laws.

This is essentially philosophical assumption – that it must be possible to resolve climate behaviour into known physics. However, with numerous failed climate predictions and the current warming hiatus, it is obviously not so. The current state of the game is that climate behaviour cannot be resolved into known physical laws.

So I haven’t found an area promising enough to be worth studying in depth because so far there isn’t one. That may be one reason why the public domain is saturated with embarrassing falsehoods, emotional rhetoric and appeals to authority. For those who must persuade and those who must be persuaded, there is nothing else on which to base the arts of persuasion.

The climate is fiendishly complex on all timescales. We need much more data and a huge flash of inspiration, but in any event there are no experts with a grasp of the whole subject.

As yet there is no such thing as climate science.

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Plenty more fish in the sea - and they're storing carbon for us!

From The Conversation website, a report suggesting that we may have massively underestimated the quantity of sealife in the middle levels of the ocean. It may not be catchable, but it could be helping sequester carbon and so reduce the threat of global warming.

http://theconversation.com/fish-in-the-twilight-cast-new-light-on-ocean-ecosystem-22987

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

A letter to Mr Christopher Booker

Dear Mr Booker

I read your latest piece on the origins of the EU (“The 100-year plot”, 8 February) with interest and would like your opinion on the implications of the English Constitution for the UK’s membership.

Some months ago, I ran a series of posts by a man called Albert Burgess, who claims that Ted Heath and others (some still alive today) knowingly and surreptitiously committed treason in 1972 (and later acts) by surrendering our national sovereignty without the public’s informed consent. Burgess is therefore pursuing the matter using the criminal justice system, and he and his colleagues have reported the alleged crimes to police stations around the country, obtaining crime numbers and pressing the police to investigate further.

A vital element of his argument is that that in choosing to change how we are to be governed, the English people, as Commons, must give their assent with their own voice and not merely via elected representatives. Yet we have never had a referendum on the fundamental issue.

If Burgess’ reasoning is correct – and I find his logic and history persuasive – then since the appropriate consent has never been obtained, surely this must mean that all acts of the British Government and Parliament implying surrender of sovereignty in any degree, are in that respect ultra vires and so have no force or effect . So rather than arguing for exit from the EU, we should be saying that we are not in it now, and we are ready to listen – skeptically, but politely - to arguments for our joining.

What do you think?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Booze and bloody murder

Does the demon drink make people more likely to kill each other? The answers are ambiguous to say the least.

I looked up tables of adult (age 15+) annual alcohol consumption per capita here, and intentional homicides per 100,000 population here. Sifting out countries where data was not available under both headings, I was left with 184 nations for the purposes of statistical correlation.

The range runs from 1.0 (perfect correlation, so that as one figure increases so does the other, in every case) to -1.0 (perfectly negative correlation, so that as one increases the other reduces).

Overall, the correlation between the two factors for this list of countries is, surprisingly, -0.1. That is, virtually no connection at all.

What if we are more selective in our survey?

Boozer countries

If we look at the top 30 countries by alcohol consumption, ranging from Moldova's 18.22 litres of pure acohol down to Spain's 11.62 litres (UK: 13.37 litres), there is a significantly negative correlation with homicide: -0.29.

Yet when we narrow down further to the top 10 toping nations, there appears to be a positive correlation: 0.48. Having said that, within those ten countries the level of alcohol intake is pretty similar: 18.22 to 15.11 litres; whereas the murder rate varies widely, from 0.7 to 7.5. Perhaps all this shows is that with too small a sample you get erratic results.

Killer countries

The list of the 30 most homicidal countries starts with Honduras (91.6 murders per 100,000) and finishes with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (21.7 murders per 100,000). The annual alcohol intake ranges from Guinea's 0.36 litres of pure alcohol up to Uganda's 11.93 litres. In this violent subset of countries, the relationship between drink and killing is pretty much random: 0.09.

But narrowing down further to the top 10 most homicidal nations, starting with Honduras again but finishing at the Bahamas (36.6 murders per 100,000), we see that their range of alcohol consumption(3.61 - 9.43 litres) is about the same as the variance in the murder rate (i.e. max = about 2.5 * min), yet the two factors are negatively correlated: -0.39. (Too small a sample, again?)

Conclusion

The conclusion is that there is no definite conclusion, though we can suspect that other (perhaps political-economic and social) factors may have a more direct influence on the propensity to kill, than the average quantity of alcohol consumed.

If you had a "session" last night, you can at least endure your thick head today with a fairly clear conscience on that score.

If you want to know a bit more, here are the four lists, followed by the long list of 184 countries. Compare the UK with the USA, for example!

 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Cameron's "Cauld Fecht" speech

From The Encyclopedia Europeana (2083 edition):

When the Prime Minister returned to the Velodrome in January 2020, the audience had been expecting a speech oriented towards the coming General Election, but Cameron had a surprise for them.

After graceful compliments to his hosts and the assembled dignitaries, he turned unexpectedly to consider developments in Scotland, now fully independent as a result of the Scottish Nationalists' resounding referendum victory five years earlier. In an electrifying oration, he warned of the centralisation of power north of the Border:

From Wallsend in the North Sea to Bowness in the Irish, a tartan curtain has descended across the British mainland. Behind that line lie all the ancient dukedoms of Scotland. Lennoxlove, Inveraray, Drumlanrig, Blair, Auchmar, Floors, Mertoun and Gordon, all these famous seats and the populations around them lie in what I must call the lairdish sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to lairdish influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Holyrood.

The address has since become universally known as the "Cauld Fecht" speech.

Opinion is divided as to its long-term merits. One the one hand, it served to alert the world to the dangers in many countries of intensifying nationalism, insularity and political repression and corruption; on the other, by isolating the Scottish leadership, it can be said to have accelerated Scotland's descent into full-blown tyranny.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Poor Tim – deselected by the web

When I’m chatting with my better half over a glass of port with the log-burner flickering away and the wind whistling round the chimney, she often has to look up bits and pieces of information on her phone.

Nothing unusual in that, but this tiny gadget gives us access to more information than we could ever have imagined just a couple of decades ago. What difference is it making to our lives?

A few centuries ago there were chained libraries and books with locks because books were expensive and not for the common people.

Today, the ancestors of the common people are able to access anything they please from an unimaginably vast repository of information, news, comment and entertainment. Most of it dross of course, but how many of us would care to read the contents of a chained library anyway?

It changes the balance of power in subtle and not so subtle ways.

We assess the capabilities of our political leaders more easily and don’t have to rely on establishment media to do it. We bypass the genteelly selective BBC and look around for sources we trust and visit them as often as we choose.

Social status is far less important as a route to sound information. A good example is how far behind the curve our leaders are on fracking. Many of us knew about the benefits long before they did, just as we have known for years that climate science is an unholy mess.

It’s impossible to be completely sure of all this, with our political class being so untrustworthy, but their mendacity is something we are aware of too. We don’t suspect – we know.

We know some of them are thick, some dishonest, some personally unreliable, some sexually deviant, some arrogantly aggressive and a few may be good eggs but the good eggs don’t usually get anywhere. We may know all this in some detail, where years ago it was all glossed over by compliant pundits.

Is it likely to make a difference though? I don’t see how it can fail. Narratives are multiplying and for every item of establishment pap there is a more reliable, less ameliorative source of information readily available.

We have reached a stage where no intelligent person takes the BBC as reliable on any subject with an establishment narrative. This is new and unless the BBC changes, its authority has gone for good.

The deselection of Tim Yeo may have had a number of causes, but one of them was surely the persistent wash of negative information telling us about the man, the games he plays and how effective he is as an MP.

It isn’t merely that the negative information on Yeo exists, but it is far more pervasive than it ever could have been in the comparatively recent past. The web seems to keep issues alive in a way which in pre-web days was rare.

Pressure could be brought on newspaper editors and stories would disappear if indeed they ever appeared in the first place. Now anyone may launch a story and if it spreads there is little others can do. Even court injunctions have been circumvented.

The world has changed and I’m sure we have yet to see the full consequences. Although Tim has had a taster.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Oh, what a surprise!

When things go wrong, the modern meme is to blame the “Law of Unintended Consequences”, which is the modern way of saying “it’s just God’s will”. However, in all too many instances, the “unintended” consequences could be easily predicted.

 Case 1: Most stocks are now owned by mutual funds. The fund managers are interested in fees, which means waiting for price increases, and selling the stocks. Their sole interest is short-term price gains. The CEO’s are hired with bonuses for price increases, and the only oversight is the Board of Directors (consisting of CEO’s of other companies), and the annual stockholder meeting (dominated by the fund managers). Then there is general surprise that many companies are managed for short-term stock price increases, and not for long-term performance!

 Case 2: Most US school systems have curricula which are dominated by methods courses, and very light on the content that they will teach. We put those ill-educated teachers into the field, and give them the message that any failure of a student means that the teacher is incompetent (I was told this by an education professor recently). We then test students and blame the teachers for every bad result. Why are we surprised at grade inflation and cheating on tests?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.