Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "The Predictions Are Wrong | Dr. Judith Curry | EP 329" video.

  1. "Trying to get all that modeled right [weather circulations, ocean circulations] modeled right, let alone making credible predictions into the future, we're not there. I mean, not even close to being there." This would seem to contradict your headline, "The Models are OK".
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  2. "Cloud feedback may be negative" Yup, it's called "albedo", and too much of it causes ice ages. Don't let her off the hook about the errors in the models. Errors, fudge factors, assumptions they pull out of their [thin air] -- "With five degrees of freedom I can hide an elephant in those numbers, and with six I can make him wiggle his trunk". Even models that can analyze data from the past with astonishingly good precision, can still be completely lost very, very quickly when it comes to projecting into the future.
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  3. One would expect that if the last hundred and fifty years were a story of ever-increasing storms of a magnitude that can engulf entire states on the Eastern Seaboard, that those storms would have cut ever-greater swathes of destruction throughout the region. They have not. The forests of New England tell a different story. Larger storms knock down larger trees. Larger trees have larger root balls. Larger root balls have more dirt clinging to them, which excavates larger holes and leaves larger piles as the roots rot away to nothing. These piles ("pillows") and holes ("cradles") even give an indication of whether the storm was a hurricane (cyclonic) or a nor'easter (linear), because trees fall away from the wind. (A tree felled by a nor'easter would not fall to the northeast.) The age of these pillows and cradles is not difficult to reliably determine. The largest pillows and cradles indicate that the most powerful hurricane to hit New England occurred about 400 years ago, long before coal was burned on anything like an industrial scale. If the power of these storms were monotonically increasing from the past to today, it's very likely that that record would have been beaten sometime in the last hundred years. The fact that the record still stands, is evidence that the "stronger storms" worry is overstated.
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  4. "The idea that consensus has anything to do with science, is just wrong" Yes, except a sociologist by the name of Thomas Kuhn popularized the idea of "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts" a generation or two ago, in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". People who don't believe in objective truth, latched onto his idea that the "truth-legitimating" machinery of science did indeed function on consensus. The Copernican Revolution was not a matter of finding "truth" or anything closer to it, than the Ptolemaic system represented; it was merely an expression of the power of a new consensus, or "paradigm". This is very, very deep into the sort of nihilistic, no-truth-but-power swamp you wade into on a regular basis. It gave the nihilists the idea that if they just controlled the levers of that scientific machinery, they could make whatever they wanted into the truth.
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  5. So... if a factor (perhaps like water) causes two opposite forcings, you have to be right about BOTH OF THEM to make a model that isn't simply accidentally accurate. You can't know if you're getting past data to match because the model can't resolve whether you're underestimating both or overestimating both, or if tunable parameters in other parts of your model are making up for the fact that you're wrong about all of it. Two wrongs, or three wrongs, or a multitude of tiny wrongs, can make a "right" in these systems. Impoverishing, immiserating, shortening, and even ending the lives of at least a billion people on the basis of these models? The Greek gods doomed men for far less hubris.
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