Maggie's Farm

Y2K was real, but they mostly fixed the bugs that were damaging before it happened.

The next date is the 32-bit unix date rollover in the 2030's sometime, unless everybody is 64 bit by then.

Global warming was never real. There's no data and no theory to support it as far as physics or statistics are concerned. There's lots of evidence for model-builders, who have their own universe.

The killer is that you can't tell a cycle from a trend with data that's short compared to the cycle, with any amount of analysis.

The eigenvalues of the discriminating matrix explode.

It's not about extrapolation but the fact that there's no evidence of AGW at all. No supporting data.

As to their knowledge of the mechanisms involved, they can't solve the Navier Stokes equation, and so pull an equation out of their ass and solve that instead. That's not knowledge of any kind. That's model building.

It responds to funding.

Again, you can't tell a trend from a cycle with data that's short compared to the cycle.

It doesn't matter what the graph looks like!

It doesn't imply anything at all, neither cooling nor warming.

If it's a cycle, and there's loads of evidence of long cycles, the earth is just doing its thing.

I don't know if it helps intuit the problem, but you have to measure high derivatives to tell if it's a long cycle, which no data is good enough to do.

Each derivative multiplies up the noise.

Your measurement winds up being 100% noise.

So any discussion of long cycles is out of the picture, data-wise. But long cycles are all that happens, as far as history goes.

Result: complete ignorance.

The slope doesn't do you any good.

You need to distinguish a cycle from a trend.

A cycle can't be AGW.

The earth is full of cycles.

Just a priori the earth is now either warming or cooling, 50/50 either way, based on its not staying the same but cycling.

You observe warming. That proves ... what? Not that there's AGW!

It proves that, as in the past, the earth isn't staying the same.

There is zero data for global warming.

You can never determine trends with data short compared to the cycles you need to exclude.

That's a mathematical fact.

If cycles are potentially in the picture, you can never determine trends. Yes, that's true unmodified.

The point of the "hockey stick" was to exhibit explosive growth that gets around it by way of the large signal exception, essentially drowning out the amplified noise with huge signal.

That's not the situation now. It's all small signal, and the optimum estimator of a trend is a linear estimator, and the linear estimator produces exponentially huge noise. QED.

They do not understand the physics because they can't solve the Navier Stokes equations. They pull an understanding out of their ass, along with the make believe equation they solve instead.

That's what model builders do.

It's not what physicists do.

When your claim is that it's AGW it matters whether the slope implies a trend or a cycle. A cycle can't be AGW.

I didn't say you can't find the slope (though with enough colored noise even that may be pretty hard), but that the slope doesn't mean anything about AGW.

To say something about AGW you need to measure cycle components and you can't do that, or even come close to doing that. It's hopeless. Mathematical fact.

As to solutions of the Navier Stokes equations, the successful solutions come from figuring out what's important and making approximations, and checking it against the real world, and fixing what comes up wrong.

Pushing the envelope is a term from aerodynamics, where your model is running up against the border of what's been checked against reality. If you need a solution near or outside the envelope, you don't do it without verifying it.

That's not because the Navier Stokes equations are wrong but because your approximations are wrong. You need new approximations.

AGW models have no reality check, and so their appoximations have as much validity as a polynomial fit of past data, namely zero for predictions.

(In 3D flows go to shorter and shorter scales, so no resolution at all is adequate. But you need short scale flows because they act as an ersatz viscosity back on larger scale flows. So you can't do a solution, in short. Pulling a substitute equation out of your as is the usual procedure among model makers (as distinguished from physicists) which as mentioned is useless for predictions outside of what's been verified.)

(ability to respond seems to be limited to long time intervals by the site, or some flaw in my browser. reply click produces no action)

Yes, it's a complex dynamical system. I cited only the first very elementary mistake of climate modelling: rather than dealing with something they can't solve, they pull a different equation out of their ass and proceed as if it wasn't a mistake. Navier Stokes is one I happen to have worked with so knew about. You can't put in a term "effective viscosity" and then ignore the short scale flows. It doesn't work.

This complex dynamical system has things a thousand times worse, each one producing another mistake.

Each mistake, though, is a knob that can be tuned, until you can match any past data you want. Those knobs are bogus, as is the matching.

Yet you can proceed as if progress were being made! Look at all the data and all the knobs.

It's just that the predictions are garbage. But soon to be corrected, as the new data goes into the corpus of the past.

As to new statistical techniques, what was wrong with the traditional ones. If you need new ones, you're on the way to another hockey stick. Get somebody to advise you on this.

Progress is not being made. There's activity, and there's funding.

Take up an interest in physics and the scales will fall from your eyes. The knobs will disappear and knobless physics equations will rule.

One more thing, what was it... oh energy budgets.

Yes, you can't solve anything you need to so you do something else instead.

During all those aeons of cycles, just wondering, what was the energy budget doing?

Do you think there might be a cycle problem in the energy budget too?

What you can't do is solve for the reaction of the complex dynamical system, which is the single thing that you need to do.

No data, no theory.

Add momentum and mass being conserved to energy and you get the Navier Stokes equations, which alas you can't solve.

The response of the complex dynamical system is what you can't model. Energy conservation won't help you.

The energy balance simply follows the cycles that you already can't separate out from a trend in the data, and that you can't predict owing to the Navier Stokes equations and a thousand other things.

No data, no theory.

If everything is measured correctly, the energy balance necessarily gives the temperature rise. Both have a trend and both have long secular cycles.

You're where you started. Get East Anglea or wherever it was to do an energy balance hockey stick and we can repeat everything.

(It occurs to me that perhaps this duplication of the problem isn't foreseen? Let me be the first to bring it up.)

Feedbacks are the response of this complex dynamical system that you can't solve, and haven't a clue about.

The AGW position is that, after aeons of huge cycles, the earth has suddenly developed an instability.

That's unlikely in the extreme. All the instabilities have been tested by history already.

An instability grows exponentially and shows up very fast. There aren't any. That would be data to normal people.

Again, the energy balance simply mimics the temperature and has the same problems. You can't tell a trend from a cycle in energy balance or temperature. This results in no conclusion from either.

You can't tell a cycle from a trend because of mathematics. The eigenvalues of the discriminating matrix explode.

That would end the story except for funding and political incentives to tap vast money flows. The sociology is clear, if not the science.

Why be part of it?

A physical model, as distinguished from actual physics equations, has lots of approximations.

Each approximation is a knob, and gives you a degree of freedom that physics does not give you.

The knobs are used to match past data first.

Then they are used to make the prediction you want.

The researchers, whether consciously or not, are running a manual Kalman filter, discovering the knob settings to use as more data is used for matching. Kalman just formalized the procedure.

This is well funded and a career path for thousands of model builders. I've seen lots of them. They're not interested in physics.

I don't understand your love of energy conservation as settling anything. If there's net incoming, the temperature rises.

That's great, but you already know that the temperature rises, and get nothing for it as to conclusions.

Now you can get nothing for finding net incoming too.

The wide cycles of the earth, thanks for bringing them up again, are what the earth does on its own. Wide cycles produce trends at various times, just as a trend today produces a trend.

So a trend, rather than producing a panic, should produce nothing at all.

It would produce nothing at all except that you can milk funding out of it, starting with needing study, for as long as you can milk it. Probably a few decades.

Transitions between stable states (are you admitting we're in a stable state?) are unstable and runaway. Every instability saturates sometime, when the terms that you're linearizing around change.

If we're in a stable state, as you say, then the system opposes the change. I've saved you a lot of research time.

I should mention something I know nothing about, and probably nobody knows anything about, namely ocean upwellings and downwellings. The fluid dynamics of that, subject to completely unknown driving forces, ought to put you off solving for anything and just enjoying the weather instead.

Somebody said that the earth generates its own heat, by the way, by way of nuclear decay in its core. Add that to your energy balance.

Physics equations are simplifications without knobs. They're like that fluids have a single velocity at a single point. There's nothing to adjust.

A modeller adds e.g. "effective viscosity" and thows away resolution, leaving himself with a knob in the model.

Climate models are nothing but knobs.

Those empirical tests that give scientists confidence in that case are the workings of a Kalman filter, and they're doing curve fitting whether they realize it or not.

Curve fitting is not physics.

I have no idea what cools the stratosphere or warms the surface. The jet stream and parking lots? There must be a terrific lapse rate.

I take it that you think it's a signature. There are a thousand signatures. You pick one that comes out.

Do you realize that you can't pick and choose?

Somebody doing physics would realize it. All the signatures have to agree. A single one that fails rules.

With climate science it's the opposite. A single one that comes out right rules.

Why that difference?

Funding instead of curiousity.

The foundation of science is curiosity. Look for curiosity in the climate science literature. Point one case out. I've never seen one.

John Gall describes "Orwell's Inversion," the confusion of input and output.

All those AGW research papers and models will without fail be called output rather than input.

Above all justify funding, is the rule.

The sociology is solid on this.

The cosmological constant is data. The equation just shows where it goes.

In the case of "effective viscosity" no value is correct, but adjusting it gives you a knob affecting your results.

Viscosity is a tensor if you use it to reflect short scale flows, but even the tensor won't work out in the end because short scale flows do other things than transport momentum.

Those research papers, empirical studies or not, are input, not output.

The cosmological constant determines whether space is flat, elliptical or hyperbolic.

I think 1 (flat) is the best guess, and is nice because the universe can be created with zero energy, but I haven't been following it really.

Scientific papers and pamphlets aimed at a particular question of public interest are input, not output.

Curiosity papers could be output.

Climate sensitivity was determined pretty well by the absence of instabilities turning up in prior aeons. It's the theory that's behind.

Either the modellers don't know what can't be computed, or are counting on their funders not knowing, or both. The theory isn't going to catch up anytime soon.

The earth managed to arrive here in spite of huge cycles.

We are still in a cycle, unless the age of reason suddenly revised the earth's dynamics, which is not a good guess.

Its reaction to a perturbation is to oppose the perturbation or it would have run away long ago.

Those are all presumptions going in, to prevent sky is falling idiocy from taking over.

But sky is falling idiocy works, and gets funding.

It is, remember, without data and without theory. Otherwise I'd go along, but happen to know better what is possible as data and as theory owing to work history.

A movement that isn't honest can be dismissed and opposed just for its snake oil component, no matter how much its true believers like it.

The data I'd think would matter most, by the way, is the coldest temperature anywhere every year. That's a pure radiation test. You can't produce the coldest spot except by radiation. Convection won't help.

Instead they're averaging over parking lots and upwelling and downwelling ocean.

Even with that, you don't get anything but that the earth is trending up or trending down or staying the same, which tells you zero about AGW.

Yes I understand the greenhouse effect, which has nothing to do with greenhouses.

I also understand that stability makes it irrelevant. that's what you are calling the unknown response of the dynamical system.

It's known, in broad outline from history, to be stable. The climate has been kicked around a lot and here it is. An instability would have shown up.

I have no idea. How does it change cloudiness? How does it change ocean upwellings? Nobody knows.

It's a system that you can't solve for the response of.

Not knowing or being able to know means going back to default presuppositions, namely it's all stable and don't worry about it.

In particular don't fund the alarm people. Offer them money instead for finding better chess opeinings, or, who knows, producing something that somebody else wants.

It's apparently hard to make the point, though I don't see why.

Consider horoscopes as making climate predictions.

Certain things would come out and other things wouldn't.

Perhaps a calamity signature!

If not everything comes out, that's not important. It would be in science, but not here in popular culture.

The newspaper column would have a certain number of followers. I guess the farmers' almanac actually does, in fact.

And look, they're measuring the stars and the planets, looking at historical records, and so forth. They could easily wear lab coats with the starry wizard caps.

And that would serve a function. It gets you to look at details, which is a welcome distraction, like following golf.

I don't think that a great amount of funding would be justified, though.

And you might want to mock the wizard caps.

Pulling equations out of your ass is climate astrology.

Some people who know about equations and physics might point that out.

Well, it's hard to say.

The atmosphere would warm by convection, and the convection would be a lot stronger owing to the temperature gradient, reducing the temperature gradient.

I don't know where that process winds up. You'd think condensation would mostly come in but that would be greenhousing and is forbidden.

At night you'd get a stable inversion with contact cooling of the atmosphere.

An atmosphere that doesn't absorb radiation isn't going to radiate it either, so it might be a nice blanket.

That seems less than fascinating.

Do you know why lows are cloudy and rainy and highs are sunny and clear? I figured it out myself one day. It's actually interesting.

I also have a great explanation for why gyroscopes act as they do.

Let's say energy is conserved, light ball from space collides with a stationary heavy ball.

Obviously the light ball stops and the heavy ball moves off at reduced velocity, arrying its energy.

But if momentum is conserved too, then the lighter ball recoils back into space and the heavier ball moves off slowly.

The Navier Stokes equations, which you can't solve, conserve energy and momentum.

I't sorry to introduce complexity into your situation, but in fact you have to solve some equations.

As to signatures, there are thousands of them. Science has to match all of them; astrology has to match only one.

It's perhaps a question of who the audience is, no?

Contemplate the ball from space recoilling back into space, owing to a slightly more inclusive theory than just energy conservation.

Might radiation not spring to mind?

Say the complex dynamical system responds by shutting down incoming radiation a little, as it warms.

That might indicate stability, which history provides strong evidence for.

The Navier Stokes equations are the guys to go to, for a more inclusive theory.

And you can't solve them.

So in short you can say anything about it, wearing lab coats and wizard hats or not.

It's alarmism and funding versus apparent historic stability.

It's all a question of whether the media can share the profits from alarmism or not. You need a mutual profitability arrangement to get alarmism to work.

Your enemy is curious people, no?

The illustration was that energy conservation is not determinative of what happens.

If heating produces cloud cover, incoming radiation ("small ball") reflection ("recoils into space") is increased.

It doesn't violate energy conservation but it produces an opposing result.

Cycles don't leave earth on one place, but following a moving stability point.

The contrary view is that any divergence from nature's path is unstable and amplified. History says that's false, and only history can solve the necessary equations.

Think of it as an analog computer with a great model.

Conservation is determinative if there's exactly one degree of freedom.

The climate is more or less the opposite of that.

I'd go with least action. You can't solve for that either.

I didn't claim that there were no cycles or that there was a single stable point. I claimed that the point that the earth is at, reflecting whatever solar activity and ocean currents and so forth exisst, is stable. A perturbation doesn't grow but rather declines back to that stable point.

Otherwise instead of thousand year cycles you'd see chaos as every weather event introduces another perturbation.

The Navier Stokes equations explain the cooling stratosphere. Unfortunately you can't solve them.

The argument and evidence is history.

It's like flight testing an airplane. If it doesn't do anything bad then you don't have to argue equations and aerodynammics, but you know that they all indicate it's stable if they were solved correctly, and if you could solve them.

That's even though the airplane has trouble climbing out of a short field on a hot day, or clears the wires by 500 feet on a winter day, an annual cycle. It's stable both ways. Perturbations do not lead it to crash.

I don't know why this is hard.

Were the climate unstable, it would careen from one extreme to the other in short order.

It doesn't do that. Its correlation time is a thousand years.

The stable point changes slowly, and there's no instability about it. A perturbation dies out and the climate returns to its plodding path from ice age to warm period unaffected.

Therefore the climate opposes an increase in greenhouse gases, rather than amplifying it.

The climate itself says this, using complete accuracy in its computations.

Consider it Le Chatelier's principle.

You're just describing stability.

An airplane is stable if it's nose-heavy. Various loads may make it stable climbing, or stable descending, or stable in level flight at a certain power setting, depending how you trim it.

To say that you haven't shown that the airplane is stable because it goes up and comes down during a flight is to miss completely what stability is.

It means that perturbations are opposed and die out. The pilot applies what corresponds to solar energy changes or deep water upwelling pattern changes and produces major shifts over long times.

The Lockheed Electra had an interesting fully three-dimensional coning instability if an engine mount was damaged, resulting in the wing coming off under certain slight perturbations. That's what an instability is.

That's what's claimed for the climate by alarmists, without evidence, since they have no data and no theory.

Lockheed could have anticipated it if they'd thought to test for it. They had the equations, but the mode wasn't two dimensionally unstable so they didn't find it.

Fortunately the climate has a zillion hours of flight testing already and seems to be safe.

I don't have any climate solutions, but nobody else does either.

Alarmism is then just alarmism.

Airplanes have been at 40,000 feet. Airplanes have been on the ground. This does not suggest a single long term stable state for airplanes.

Yet whether an airplane is stable or not doesn't have anything to do with that. It has to do with growth rates of perturbations.

If it's positive, it takes over everything, and the wing falls off.

If it's negative, a perturbation dies out and you will not even know it happened.

Is this hard?

Climate alarm is based on the wing falls off amplification of warming. This doesn't happen. The climate opposes perturbations. The growth rate is negative. We know that.

That's what the zillions of flight testing hours of the climate tells us.

If your theory doesn't say that, your theory is empirically wrong.

On top of that, you in fact have no data and no theory. You pull equations out of your ass, as far as physics is concerned. Your thoory doesn't even qualify to be wrong. It's not in the runing.

Eventually the airplane will land. Eventually we will have another ice age. Eventually the universe will die. These are not immediate stability questsions. A secular course is followed for other reasons.

You can't point to mechanisms because you can't solve the relevant equations. As it says way back up there at the top somewhere.

It's no just good putting on a lab coat and a wizard cap with stars and moons on it, playing a scientist on tv and begging for money. No data - you can't tell a cycle from a trend - and no theory - you can't solve the Navier Stokes equations.

Instead we rely on Bayes, and put screens on the windows to keep the bugs out.

The earth can reactively increase and decrease reflection of incoming radiation. That does depend on turbulence, by way of short scale flows.

The AGW scaring is based on claiming an instability in how the earth reacts, which is baseless. Not that CO2 raises the temperature but that the earth reacts with water vapor raising the temperature more and it runs away.

The evidence is the opposite.

The argument is then confused by seeming to be about whether warming is happening or not. It's about an instability, not warming. A cycle gives warming, and we have lots of cycles. Bayes says that if the earth is warming, it's a cycle. If the earth is cooling, it's a cycle.

There's no theory and no data that shows otherwise.

Turbulence winds up as heat, by the way, so isn't going to matter in a teapot.

Actually you probably can solve for the teapot flows, and then check the results. The checking part is what makes it valid.

The Boussinesq approximation might even apply and has a long history.

The known feedbacks are what's in question. It's what you know that's wrong that gives trouble, not to mention fraud.

But you can check the results, determine that the resolution works, that is you get turbulence of the right scales and it has the right effects. If it doesn't, you need another method of solution.

It's called pushing the envelope when you stray outside what's been validated. It means you have to check against reality.

Your solution may be right or it may be completely misguided.

Aerodynamics has a huge catalog of numerical methods that check against reality, but still have an envelope that limits the regions of validity.

The teapot is most likely within an existing envelope.

The climate is not.

Navier Stokes solutions are interesting in that they don't converge as you reduce the step sizes and resolution. The particular answer at any point does not approach a true solution. It may be flowing the opposite direction. But calculations of macroscopic stuff based on the solutions may be fine, that is, the solutions are representative, which is what you want anyway.

One macroscopic thing you want to get right is stability, for instance.

Your solutions have to be good enough to achieve that. And you determine that by checking.

Note that solving an averaged equation is completely wrong; averaging particular equation solutions is correct.

They are vastly different.

No, you have to get flow instabilities at the right places, for instance, e.g. to get herringbone clouds forming or not. You don't have to get the phase right, just a typical response so you can average over typical responses. You want herringbone clouds when herringbone clouds are typical and not when not.

That takes far more resolution that you can in fact do. You not only get the phases wrong but get the whole behavior wrong.

If you can't generate typical responses, you can't say anything; and you can't generate typical responses. You are hopelessly far from it.

The herringbone clouds are the response to greenhouse gasses. That's what your calculation would find, say, as part of the stability of the climate. It's not an avenue, it's the avenue, if you want to give the climate response.

Not counting pulling an equation out of your ass, of course.

You need ensemble averages, and you can't get ensembles.