Interview with a Climate Scientist

[radon]

Re: Interview with a Climate Scientist

Human civilization is capable of getting that far off the rails, for that long, easily enough. I'll agree with you that the idea that we'd have been fine except for the Evil Goldmanites seems unlikely, too conspiratorial. (Maybe that's why I liked that idea ;).)

Rather I suspect it works something more like the following.

Those men who are the most driven to acquire wealth and power will tune in early to ideas bubbling in the cauldron of discussion which they sense can be used to gain them the most leverage and power. Such men are not by nature humble truth seeking scientists or technicians. Rather they are heat seeking missiles; the heat they seek is power. They hire wonks and other less ambitious worker bees who will provide such technical supporting evidence as they find useful. They will squelch, distract, suppress, ignore or destroy worker bees who get in the way. Goldman certainly attracts its share of such alpha males. Major national government (beauracratic, legislative, executive, judicial and regulatory), international, non-governmental (NGO), financial, and corporate power positions also attract such alpha males.

Ideas that can justify aggrandizing power can flourish in this petri dish of ambition, with little (more likely negative) correlation to whether those ideas would survive an honest scientific debate. Any person or organization that would impede the growth of such ideas is co-opted (money talks) or marginalized or destroyed or bullhorned into oblivion. Universities, research journals, main stream media, Hollywood, public education, church leaders, peer reviewing of research work, web logs, and wikipedia pages can all be sucked into the orbit of such power black holes. Entire careers of more naive wonks and technicians can rise and fall in such gravity fields of power.

Michael Milkin (the bond king) and Henry Paulson and most any CEO of Goldman or JPMorgan are examples of such alpha males. The CIA and Defense Department seem to hold less public but more lethal variants. Putin and Soros play at these levels. Whether Bill Clinton played at the top of such levels or was a deeply flawed pawn of them is not obvious to me. I suspect George Bush the Lessor is more a pawn of them; his father George Bush the Greater more a player. Obama has been groomed for years as a teleprompter for the powerful. JFK likely crossed the powerful; his death served as a warning to future Presidents. The audacious false flag operation of 9/11 (and perhaps London's 7/7 as well) put this dangerous power and scope on display for all with eyes to see.

... so, no, it's not just Goldman Sachs ... not in my jaundiced view.

I really need to PhotoShop a tinfoil hat for my cow avatar someday.

This is an interesting viewpoint. I might need to get a tinfoil myself.

[radon]

Re: Interview with a Climate Scientist

How you could read the interview with Dr. Schmidt and come away with the impression that he is naive of the possibility that temperature readings taken from a city might not be fully accurate is beyond me.

First, again, he is not using correlation data in building these models, but the raw, physical processes. You don't need to account for the error in making measurements in a city when you are using the well-understood chemical and physical process of evaporation etc in building models.

Second, he states repeatedly that he uses Bayesian methods (among other things) to quantitatively asses models' predictive ability. That you think a guy like this would go to these lengths to assess the quality of various models and not account for something as simple as the city-effect of tempreature is beyond me. Seriously - high school kids are familiar with the effect of increased temperatures in and around cities - you really think people who have studied this stuff for decades have failed to account for it?

You can assume these people are idiots if you want. I don't buy it. Like I said before, when someone believes something first and looks for data to support it second, there is no amount of discussion that is going to change his or her mind. It's all too easy to decrease the signal to noise ratio.

Forget it, he's just trolling. Also if you believe his post he has witnessed a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.