I tried to close the comment argument with Chris below, and actually liked what I’d written enough that I thought I’d promote it (slightly cleaned up) to a post…<\/i><\/p>\n
If you’re thinking that AGW will be conclusively proved or disproved in blogs you’ve got bigger issues than I can help you with.<\/p>\n
What blogs can – and I believe have – done is to suggest that the emperor has no clothes. There’s a world of difference between pointing out that standard accounting practices haven’t been followed – and therefore we ought to recheck the books – and actually re-auditing GM’s annual financial statement. It’s unfair and unreasonable to suggest that people who point out a) also have a responsibility to do b), or the current books stand.<\/p>\n
I do think that people are deluding themselves by suggesting that AGW is ‘science’ as we’ve practiced it for the last few centuries. There’s an epistic problem that comes from the fact that AGW is inherently a wicked problem – we can’t run global climates in labs, over and over again and check what happens in the empirical world. There’s no empiricism there.<\/p>\n
Instead we run computer models.<\/p>\n
Now in a century, to be sure, we’ll be able to validate (or invalidate) the predictive power of those models.<\/p>\n
Until then, they are exercises in quant ‘science’, which is likely to be as successful as quant ‘finance’ was for LTCM, Bear Stearns, Lehman, et alia in the last decade.<\/p>\n
Both work well in limited domains (what Taleb calls ‘mediocrestan’) and fail catastrophically outside them.<\/p>\n
In my view, science is empirically reproduceable. Feynman said (I think it’s in the Lectures) “The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth’.” Anything that isn’t empirically reproduceable – isn’t really science.<\/p>\n
When AGW advocates start running reproduceable experiments, let us all know. For now, I’d even settle for reproduceable base data.<\/p>\n
That’s pretty much all I have on this. You’re welcome to respond, advocate, cavort, or whatever in response.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The epistic problem with AGW<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2268"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}