There is a 50:50 chance that the increase in global average temperatures will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times in at least one of the next five years, the World Meteorological Organisation has reported.
Ok, Irina, still another great article, an your writing style is right on the money - but this "Please feel free to call me a nit-picker. I’ll take it as a compliment because literal nits are a major nuisance. I’ve been 10. I’ve had lice. Nits must be picked, even when not literal." - Is absolutely wonderful.
Thank you for this piece (and all others!). I agree with your sentiment and do so on grounds of reason, logic and evidence and not just my sentimental and confirmation bias.
I would refine your views slightly by differentiating between weather and climate. Weather is inherently more unpredictable as it relates to the chaotic nature of the system, climate is much more predictable as it relates to the non-chaotic variables in the system
(i.e. weather = will it rain next week? I have no clue. Climate = is it going to be colder next February in Hungary than today, May 11, 2022? yes for sure as it will be winter then and it is spring now)
"In all honesty, a 50:50 chance means, quite literally, that either something will happen or it won’t. I have a 50:50 chance of dying by the end of the week. You do, too. Everyone does."
Actually, you are confusing a discrete binomial random variable with a continuous random variable. You do not have a 50:50 chance of dying by the end of the week just like there is not a 50:50 chance of me finding a million dollars underneath my bed when I go look later, even though there is or isn't a million dollars underneath my bed. Again, while it is true that you and I will either be dead next week or not be dead next week, that dichotomous fact does not say anything about the unobservable and continuous random variable that does indeed describe the probability distribution of our deaths one week out.
I didn't understand your last sentence, I'll say how the issue looks to me : "Chances are 50:50" is typical of things influenced by factors of which we either know nothing, or are unwilling to take into account what we know about them. So, it's curious how a study with "a high level of scientific skill" gets us to exactly the same 'probability' as if we had no skill or no information whatsoever, or both.
Statistical thinking is definitely not an inherent human skill, I'm still working on it after a decade an half of "higher learning". You may want to either refresh or grapple with discrete versus continuous random variables, uniform versus non-uniform distributions, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, critical values that sort of thing.
I don't the details of this particular study and you do need considerable domain knowledge to critically appraise the literature in any field (i.e. life scientists would generally lack the domain knowledge to able to appraise literature in the physical sciences and vice-versa, even though both groups would be well versed in statistics as it pertains to their chosen domain)
Aside from that, you might be confusing "chances are 50:50" as a figure of speech versus an actual statistical or quantitative assessment regarding some probability distribution of future outcomes. Every random variable, observable or not, discrete or continuous is defined by some probability distribution or density function.
Citing the possible fact that a study with "a high level of scientific skill" fails to achieve findings with statistical significance (call it a p value <0.05 on a test of the null hypothesis for example or however else one may define statistical significance given the issue at hand); citing such fact does not mean lack of scientific skill, maybe it means that our scientific skill has thus far on this one instance, in this one study validated the working hypothesis that betting on "climate catastrophe" in the foreseeable future is no different than betting on heads or tails. This may imply that objectively we may be as confident in upcoming "climate catastrophe" as we can be in the outcome of the next flip of a "climate coin".
Personally, I'm happy to abandon all other human pursuits and "fight climate change to the death" but I would first need to see robust empirical evidence that this catastrophe is indeed in the horizon. So far, such evidence is lacking. That is not to say that we shouldn't work to reduce greenhouse gases or that greenhouse gases have zero effect on climate; this simply means that Earth, an astronomical body that has existed for about 4b years will not turn into Venus in our lifetimes nor the lifetimes of our children, grandchildren, great-great grandchildren etc. (you get the point)
Also, I wouldn't equate whatever you understand by "Chances are 50:50" with "factors of which we either know nothing, or are unwilling to take into account what we know about them".
I may know a lot about the dynamics of random variable X, bring that knowledge to the forefront in a study of those dynamics and the study may very well fail to reject the null hypothesis as outlined in the study design or fail to achieve statistical significance. Again, I think you may be confusing politics and the scientific method. The scientific method is a-political, that is not the the same as saying that scientists are a-political or that science is done in an a-political environment. It's important to differentiate between technical language and every day language.
Alright, that's somewhat overwhelming. I don't think our differences are all too great; if I want elucidation I may go to what William Briggs the statistician has already written.
What do you mean Yelian. What are the chances that you will see an elephant on Main Street of Ourtown tomorrow. 50:50, either you see it or you don't. That is a joke I heard from my Russian friend a while ago. But seriously I did take a graduate course in the department of atmospheric sciences some 50 years ago, and the main problem in weather prediction was the unavailability of stations to record the important variables such as temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity over the world's oceans. You need a grid of locations to make a computer calculations over a certain period of time. Well, at that time the computers were slow. It was Lewis Richardson who started this in Great Britain in 1910 and he had students crank up the numbers. It took many days to predict the weather for six hours ahead with the given data. He failed as this link shows. There is still the Richardson number named in his honor.
After the calculation is made it needs to be restarted with new measured values. The upshot was that you cannot predict weather further than 3 days ahead. I am not sure what the situation is today with satellite measurement and faster computers.
Right, I've heard variations of the same joke. You might regret admitting to your knowledge in atmospheric sciences because I have questions. :) How accurate are the estimates of pre-industrial era temperatures given there were now weather stations at all in those days? How long a period do IPCC scientists use for that notorious pre-industrial baseline for their computer modelling of future climate patterns?
Allow me to offer my feedback and answer as succinctly as possible. 1) The estimates are accurate enough to know anthropomorphic climate change is a thing and we should pay attention to; end of story. (i.e. anthropomorphic climate change being a thing does not equal we are going to die from it tomorrow, it just means we should indeed work to more efficiently use our fossil fuels and to electrify for the sake of decarbonization and not electrify for its own virtue signaling sake)
Yelian, electricity is generated by coal and natural gas. Solar 0.5% and wind 1.0% of primary energy production, although larger for electricity production.
However, electricity is 16% of primary energy production.
The ambitious goals in Europe move the heavy industry to Asia with greater release of carbon. As a side note, after the industry in Finland was cleaning up its effluent flow to the Gulf of Finland, there were articles that suggested that it would have been better after that to invest the money next into Estonian industries to stop their pollution. This was in the late Soviet times. I supposed that this would have been a gift and did not happen.
Yelian, this may be good place to discuss some other issues, as we are tucked into a corner of the internet where there is a minimum amount of noise and Irina may get some ideas to write about. I mentioned earlier about the damage of computers doing to science. The same is true in the finance, right? New financial instruments that cannot be understood. If those who programmed them did not document the codes properly and did not provide a good theory guide of the mathematics used, even they might have forgotten what they did after six months of doing something else. This is related to algorithmic complexity.
Since you have studied economics and I only done it casually. The production function used to include land, labor and capital. Now land is ignored and the so called Solow residual is said to be related to technological innovation or human capital. Why is energy excluded? The answer seems to be that its cost is too low, compared to labor and capital. This is the price share theorem, which I understand as it part of the stuff I learned from thermodynamics, namely a Legendre transformation. So what happens when energy cost increases and begins to approach that of labor. Clearly, more work is done with labor incrementally. It seems to me that this leads us back toward the pre-industrial conditions of our economy. The economists can still claim that their theoretical structure works. But it sure did not inform us what is happening right now as oil production is in decline and its quality is declining even more rapidly. This price share "theorem" shows brings up the Oscar Wilde quote, that "people know the price of everything but the value of nothing". I could go on ranting about economics but will stop here.
Sounds like you are begging to become familiar with the work of Professor Steve Keen on bringing economics into our modern understanding of complex adaptive dynamic systems (which of course implies much more attention to energy as an input into any and every production and consumption function and indeed into every and all reaction functions)
*I'm assuming you're not familiar with Professor Keen, but of course I could be wrong*
Actually, I know his work but have not read his book.
My doubts come from reading the book by Reiner Kummel with the title The Second Law of Economics, - Energy, Entropy ad the Origins of Wealth. He is a physicist and did his postdoctoral studies under Bardeen in Illinois. After that he went to Colombia, which in itself was good as he could think issues our independently and not be influenced by the modern American and European schools of thought.
In his introduction that said that the did not like thermodynamics because the difficulty of knowing what were the proper independent variables. Apparently he had not studied the textbook by Herbert Callen, where the fundamentals are discussed differently than in other books. I must admit that while I was teaching thermodynamics early in my career, these things we not clear to me either at the level Callen discusses them. But let's say that you write the first of Gibbs equations as
du = Tds - dv
where u is the internal energy, s is the entropy and v is the specific volume. Then this equation implies the u=u(s,v) by seeing what variables are differentials in this expression. Now introduce h, the enthalpy, defined by
h=u+pv
and the Gibbs equation takes the form
dh= Tds-vdp
and this shows that h=h(s,p) again by inspection of the differentials.
A deeper understanding means that the definition of enthalpy
h=u+pv
is a Legendre transformation in the mathematical sense. I will not pursue this any further, only to say that when Kummel saw the similarity between this aspect of thermodynamics and economic theory of maximization of utility via the share price theorem. As a result he not only understood these issues in economic theory better but also the thermodynamics made more sense to him.
Incidentally, Kummel has a lot of thermodynamics in his book and if you do not know it yet, it is not worth studying from his book or elsewhere. His Chapter 4 is on economics and I have gone through that fairly well.
But let's return to the original question of the relationship between labor and energy. Does my reasoning seem right to you?
I have no idea about their accuracy. There are heat island effects. That is the weather stations have not moved as cities have grown and the temperature of the cities are higher than in open country. These old records are adjusted to account for this. Then there is the anomaly that the satellite measurements were different than measurements taken in the lower atmosphere. This was pointed out and to their credit climate scientists switched to rely on the satellite data. The discrepancy had to do with what is happening in the lower and upper part of the atmosphere. Clearly this is so complicated that one cannot understand it easily if you are not deeply involved in the research. Even then how to make sense out of computer calculations. Clifford Truesdell, a mathematician an contributor to the theory of continuum mechanics (he edited at least one volume of Euler's collected works with original in Latin) wrote an essay saying "computers was a death knell to science". Therefore I rely on proxy evidence. There does not seem to be disagreement about the northern regions warming faster than mid-latitudes and the danger of permafrost melting leading to more global warming. Gulf Steam may also slip to a new mode, freezing Scandinavia. But then there is also the enormous money going to climate research, corrupting the process. Same as we have seen in the case on COVID; regulatory capture at all levels.
Irina, I think you have seen my video and know my view. Peak oil, overpopulation, corruption across most fields, all point to the fact that we are experiencing the "collapse of a complex society" in the way Joseph Tainter describes it in his book with the same name. This Industrial Civilization is "toast".
I'm no climate scientist, I'm a finance guy but there is some considerable overlap in the quantitative study of markets and macro-economies as complex adaptive dynamic SOCIAL systems versus weather/the atmosphere which is a complex adaptive dynamic PHYSICAL system. Don't worry about the nuance, the point is that both are best understood and modeled under complexity theory (a branch of modern physics).
If you're interested I suggest keeping up with the work done at the Santa Fe Institute which is home to most of the top complexity theorists of our time. Even though you might think that the atmosphere has nothing to do with financial markets; the mathematics and statistical behavior of the two systems are nearly identical. The reason complex adaptive dynamic systems (physical or otherwise) are so difficult to forecast is that the future state of the system is 1) highly path dependent and 2) extremely sensitive to initial conditions. But I suspect you already knew that and much more!
Yelian, interestingly the strange attractors arose from the work of Edward Lorenz who was a climate scientist. I was working on hydrodynamic stability and saw how they were derived from a truncated form of the modes in Benard convection. So this is an interesting connection between complexity theory, financial markets and atmospheric sciences. It was Poincare who established the fact that there as systems that sensitive to initial conditions as you most likely know. Well, I just checked and all this can be learned from WIkipedia, but it shows the naming this is to originate from Lorenz, whereas, if my memory serves, it was Leo Kadanov who called it such. This name is unfortunately misleading as the turbulence created by a butterfly would be damped out locally very soon. The argument given to the butterfly effect falls into the same category as the possibility of monkeys producing the works of Shakespeare. This is nonsense as was shown on Kittel in his book on statistical mechanics, That is, a probabilistic calculation shows that it would take longer than the life of a universe.
Great post Irina. In this context "temporarily" is what is sometimes called a "weasel" word. It provides a way out if things don't go to plan. Lawyers use them all the time when drafting contracts.
Great read Irna. I do not adhere to manmade global warming like some do. Notice how over time the once dire situation has now changed to global climate change. The reason for this is every prediction every single time has failed to happen. I do not make this up everyone here can go check it, investigate it and draw your own conclusion.
Having said all of that pollution not CO2 is destroying our habitats along with a population explosion. We are destroying pristine habitats around the world so we can feed growing populations that do not or cannot do modern farming. Most farming in the Southern Hemisphere is subsistent farming. Only recently have many African countries allowed China to assist them with commercial farming and the local populations do not like farming on a massive scale even when it makes their lives easier.
Farm chemical runoff is destroying our oceans along with our governments using the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific for their trash dumps. Governments around the world claim global warming is destroying their countries or states. Reefs are dying off to temperature changes and all of this is basically lies. They want us to pony up for their loose regulations and outright disregard for this planet. Fartm runoff is destroying Australia's great barrier reef as noted in several studies complete with satellite photographic evidence and yet those studies are discarded because they do not fit into the current global money scam about to be played on every human being on the planet. Polluters are going to basically pay the tax, pass on this to the consumer and continue to pollute. Nothing changes ! Absolutely nothing !
I was born in California and nothing has changed there except the population and pollution. Five of the top ten most polluted cities in the USA reside in Calif. Droughts always happen it is a desert but you all now believe global warming caused this. Not at all population caused this. I know I lived in California Venice Beach most of my life until I move out of that crazy place. Sorry for thew ramblings but we are being sold a bunch of lies and many now worship at the altar of man made climate change. What a crock.
This shift from protecting the environment )always a good thing) to protecting the climate (?!?) used to be the most baffling development for me. Now I can suggest with reasonable degree of conviction why this is -- you've said it, too. Of course, they throw in some environmental destruction as a result of the changing climate and make sure to put the focus on the poor but that's the default setting of the narrative, after all.
In 2020 It was published an article by Valentina Zharkova in ”Temperature” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243) and the debates around her thesis were limited to the academic field. Unfortunatelly due to the lack of dialogue between the people (they were only placed in two opposite ”camps” - pro and against something) the general public can see only the side which is covered by mass media. Thank you once again for the article.
Ok, Irina, still another great article, an your writing style is right on the money - but this "Please feel free to call me a nit-picker. I’ll take it as a compliment because literal nits are a major nuisance. I’ve been 10. I’ve had lice. Nits must be picked, even when not literal." - Is absolutely wonderful.
Great job.
Thanks, Stu!
Same... Can't wait for Irina to write a "Don't Look Up"-style movie, exposing Hollywood's ignorance.
Thank you for this piece (and all others!). I agree with your sentiment and do so on grounds of reason, logic and evidence and not just my sentimental and confirmation bias.
I would refine your views slightly by differentiating between weather and climate. Weather is inherently more unpredictable as it relates to the chaotic nature of the system, climate is much more predictable as it relates to the non-chaotic variables in the system
(i.e. weather = will it rain next week? I have no clue. Climate = is it going to be colder next February in Hungary than today, May 11, 2022? yes for sure as it will be winter then and it is spring now)
"In all honesty, a 50:50 chance means, quite literally, that either something will happen or it won’t. I have a 50:50 chance of dying by the end of the week. You do, too. Everyone does."
Actually, you are confusing a discrete binomial random variable with a continuous random variable. You do not have a 50:50 chance of dying by the end of the week just like there is not a 50:50 chance of me finding a million dollars underneath my bed when I go look later, even though there is or isn't a million dollars underneath my bed. Again, while it is true that you and I will either be dead next week or not be dead next week, that dichotomous fact does not say anything about the unobservable and continuous random variable that does indeed describe the probability distribution of our deaths one week out.
Keep up the good work!
I didn't understand your last sentence, I'll say how the issue looks to me : "Chances are 50:50" is typical of things influenced by factors of which we either know nothing, or are unwilling to take into account what we know about them. So, it's curious how a study with "a high level of scientific skill" gets us to exactly the same 'probability' as if we had no skill or no information whatsoever, or both.
Statistical thinking is definitely not an inherent human skill, I'm still working on it after a decade an half of "higher learning". You may want to either refresh or grapple with discrete versus continuous random variables, uniform versus non-uniform distributions, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, critical values that sort of thing.
I don't the details of this particular study and you do need considerable domain knowledge to critically appraise the literature in any field (i.e. life scientists would generally lack the domain knowledge to able to appraise literature in the physical sciences and vice-versa, even though both groups would be well versed in statistics as it pertains to their chosen domain)
Aside from that, you might be confusing "chances are 50:50" as a figure of speech versus an actual statistical or quantitative assessment regarding some probability distribution of future outcomes. Every random variable, observable or not, discrete or continuous is defined by some probability distribution or density function.
Citing the possible fact that a study with "a high level of scientific skill" fails to achieve findings with statistical significance (call it a p value <0.05 on a test of the null hypothesis for example or however else one may define statistical significance given the issue at hand); citing such fact does not mean lack of scientific skill, maybe it means that our scientific skill has thus far on this one instance, in this one study validated the working hypothesis that betting on "climate catastrophe" in the foreseeable future is no different than betting on heads or tails. This may imply that objectively we may be as confident in upcoming "climate catastrophe" as we can be in the outcome of the next flip of a "climate coin".
Personally, I'm happy to abandon all other human pursuits and "fight climate change to the death" but I would first need to see robust empirical evidence that this catastrophe is indeed in the horizon. So far, such evidence is lacking. That is not to say that we shouldn't work to reduce greenhouse gases or that greenhouse gases have zero effect on climate; this simply means that Earth, an astronomical body that has existed for about 4b years will not turn into Venus in our lifetimes nor the lifetimes of our children, grandchildren, great-great grandchildren etc. (you get the point)
Also, I wouldn't equate whatever you understand by "Chances are 50:50" with "factors of which we either know nothing, or are unwilling to take into account what we know about them".
I may know a lot about the dynamics of random variable X, bring that knowledge to the forefront in a study of those dynamics and the study may very well fail to reject the null hypothesis as outlined in the study design or fail to achieve statistical significance. Again, I think you may be confusing politics and the scientific method. The scientific method is a-political, that is not the the same as saying that scientists are a-political or that science is done in an a-political environment. It's important to differentiate between technical language and every day language.
Hope that helps somehow!
Alright, that's somewhat overwhelming. I don't think our differences are all too great; if I want elucidation I may go to what William Briggs the statistician has already written.
"Aside from that, you might be confusing "chances are 50:50" as a figure of speech versus an actual statistical or quantitative assessment"
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wmo-update-5050-chance-of-global-temperature-temporarily-reaching-15°c-threshold
Thanks, Yelian, that's insightful and much more intellectual than I can ever be. Love your comments!
You give as well as you take...it's 50:50 collaboration and positive sum game after all :)
What do you mean Yelian. What are the chances that you will see an elephant on Main Street of Ourtown tomorrow. 50:50, either you see it or you don't. That is a joke I heard from my Russian friend a while ago. But seriously I did take a graduate course in the department of atmospheric sciences some 50 years ago, and the main problem in weather prediction was the unavailability of stations to record the important variables such as temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity over the world's oceans. You need a grid of locations to make a computer calculations over a certain period of time. Well, at that time the computers were slow. It was Lewis Richardson who started this in Great Britain in 1910 and he had students crank up the numbers. It took many days to predict the weather for six hours ahead with the given data. He failed as this link shows. There is still the Richardson number named in his honor.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/01/17/lewis-richardson-father-numerical-weather-prediction/
After the calculation is made it needs to be restarted with new measured values. The upshot was that you cannot predict weather further than 3 days ahead. I am not sure what the situation is today with satellite measurement and faster computers.
Right, I've heard variations of the same joke. You might regret admitting to your knowledge in atmospheric sciences because I have questions. :) How accurate are the estimates of pre-industrial era temperatures given there were now weather stations at all in those days? How long a period do IPCC scientists use for that notorious pre-industrial baseline for their computer modelling of future climate patterns?
Allow me to offer my feedback and answer as succinctly as possible. 1) The estimates are accurate enough to know anthropomorphic climate change is a thing and we should pay attention to; end of story. (i.e. anthropomorphic climate change being a thing does not equal we are going to die from it tomorrow, it just means we should indeed work to more efficiently use our fossil fuels and to electrify for the sake of decarbonization and not electrify for its own virtue signaling sake)
Yelian, electricity is generated by coal and natural gas. Solar 0.5% and wind 1.0% of primary energy production, although larger for electricity production.
However, electricity is 16% of primary energy production.
The ambitious goals in Europe move the heavy industry to Asia with greater release of carbon. As a side note, after the industry in Finland was cleaning up its effluent flow to the Gulf of Finland, there were articles that suggested that it would have been better after that to invest the money next into Estonian industries to stop their pollution. This was in the late Soviet times. I supposed that this would have been a gift and did not happen.
Yelian, this may be good place to discuss some other issues, as we are tucked into a corner of the internet where there is a minimum amount of noise and Irina may get some ideas to write about. I mentioned earlier about the damage of computers doing to science. The same is true in the finance, right? New financial instruments that cannot be understood. If those who programmed them did not document the codes properly and did not provide a good theory guide of the mathematics used, even they might have forgotten what they did after six months of doing something else. This is related to algorithmic complexity.
Since you have studied economics and I only done it casually. The production function used to include land, labor and capital. Now land is ignored and the so called Solow residual is said to be related to technological innovation or human capital. Why is energy excluded? The answer seems to be that its cost is too low, compared to labor and capital. This is the price share theorem, which I understand as it part of the stuff I learned from thermodynamics, namely a Legendre transformation. So what happens when energy cost increases and begins to approach that of labor. Clearly, more work is done with labor incrementally. It seems to me that this leads us back toward the pre-industrial conditions of our economy. The economists can still claim that their theoretical structure works. But it sure did not inform us what is happening right now as oil production is in decline and its quality is declining even more rapidly. This price share "theorem" shows brings up the Oscar Wilde quote, that "people know the price of everything but the value of nothing". I could go on ranting about economics but will stop here.
Sounds like you are begging to become familiar with the work of Professor Steve Keen on bringing economics into our modern understanding of complex adaptive dynamic systems (which of course implies much more attention to energy as an input into any and every production and consumption function and indeed into every and all reaction functions)
*I'm assuming you're not familiar with Professor Keen, but of course I could be wrong*
Actually, I know his work but have not read his book.
My doubts come from reading the book by Reiner Kummel with the title The Second Law of Economics, - Energy, Entropy ad the Origins of Wealth. He is a physicist and did his postdoctoral studies under Bardeen in Illinois. After that he went to Colombia, which in itself was good as he could think issues our independently and not be influenced by the modern American and European schools of thought.
In his introduction that said that the did not like thermodynamics because the difficulty of knowing what were the proper independent variables. Apparently he had not studied the textbook by Herbert Callen, where the fundamentals are discussed differently than in other books. I must admit that while I was teaching thermodynamics early in my career, these things we not clear to me either at the level Callen discusses them. But let's say that you write the first of Gibbs equations as
du = Tds - dv
where u is the internal energy, s is the entropy and v is the specific volume. Then this equation implies the u=u(s,v) by seeing what variables are differentials in this expression. Now introduce h, the enthalpy, defined by
h=u+pv
and the Gibbs equation takes the form
dh= Tds-vdp
and this shows that h=h(s,p) again by inspection of the differentials.
A deeper understanding means that the definition of enthalpy
h=u+pv
is a Legendre transformation in the mathematical sense. I will not pursue this any further, only to say that when Kummel saw the similarity between this aspect of thermodynamics and economic theory of maximization of utility via the share price theorem. As a result he not only understood these issues in economic theory better but also the thermodynamics made more sense to him.
Incidentally, Kummel has a lot of thermodynamics in his book and if you do not know it yet, it is not worth studying from his book or elsewhere. His Chapter 4 is on economics and I have gone through that fairly well.
But let's return to the original question of the relationship between labor and energy. Does my reasoning seem right to you?
I have no idea about their accuracy. There are heat island effects. That is the weather stations have not moved as cities have grown and the temperature of the cities are higher than in open country. These old records are adjusted to account for this. Then there is the anomaly that the satellite measurements were different than measurements taken in the lower atmosphere. This was pointed out and to their credit climate scientists switched to rely on the satellite data. The discrepancy had to do with what is happening in the lower and upper part of the atmosphere. Clearly this is so complicated that one cannot understand it easily if you are not deeply involved in the research. Even then how to make sense out of computer calculations. Clifford Truesdell, a mathematician an contributor to the theory of continuum mechanics (he edited at least one volume of Euler's collected works with original in Latin) wrote an essay saying "computers was a death knell to science". Therefore I rely on proxy evidence. There does not seem to be disagreement about the northern regions warming faster than mid-latitudes and the danger of permafrost melting leading to more global warming. Gulf Steam may also slip to a new mode, freezing Scandinavia. But then there is also the enormous money going to climate research, corrupting the process. Same as we have seen in the case on COVID; regulatory capture at all levels.
Irina, I think you have seen my video and know my view. Peak oil, overpopulation, corruption across most fields, all point to the fact that we are experiencing the "collapse of a complex society" in the way Joseph Tainter describes it in his book with the same name. This Industrial Civilization is "toast".
I'm no climate scientist, I'm a finance guy but there is some considerable overlap in the quantitative study of markets and macro-economies as complex adaptive dynamic SOCIAL systems versus weather/the atmosphere which is a complex adaptive dynamic PHYSICAL system. Don't worry about the nuance, the point is that both are best understood and modeled under complexity theory (a branch of modern physics).
If you're interested I suggest keeping up with the work done at the Santa Fe Institute which is home to most of the top complexity theorists of our time. Even though you might think that the atmosphere has nothing to do with financial markets; the mathematics and statistical behavior of the two systems are nearly identical. The reason complex adaptive dynamic systems (physical or otherwise) are so difficult to forecast is that the future state of the system is 1) highly path dependent and 2) extremely sensitive to initial conditions. But I suspect you already knew that and much more!
Yelian, interestingly the strange attractors arose from the work of Edward Lorenz who was a climate scientist. I was working on hydrodynamic stability and saw how they were derived from a truncated form of the modes in Benard convection. So this is an interesting connection between complexity theory, financial markets and atmospheric sciences. It was Poincare who established the fact that there as systems that sensitive to initial conditions as you most likely know. Well, I just checked and all this can be learned from WIkipedia, but it shows the naming this is to originate from Lorenz, whereas, if my memory serves, it was Leo Kadanov who called it such. This name is unfortunately misleading as the turbulence created by a butterfly would be damped out locally very soon. The argument given to the butterfly effect falls into the same category as the possibility of monkeys producing the works of Shakespeare. This is nonsense as was shown on Kittel in his book on statistical mechanics, That is, a probabilistic calculation shows that it would take longer than the life of a universe.
“You can’t lament the loss of biodiversity and promote wind parks and solar farms with the same mouth, now, can you?”
Nailed it.
Great post Irina. In this context "temporarily" is what is sometimes called a "weasel" word. It provides a way out if things don't go to plan. Lawyers use them all the time when drafting contracts.
A weasel word -- how brilliant. I'll try to remember it for future use, thank you!
Great read Irna. I do not adhere to manmade global warming like some do. Notice how over time the once dire situation has now changed to global climate change. The reason for this is every prediction every single time has failed to happen. I do not make this up everyone here can go check it, investigate it and draw your own conclusion.
Having said all of that pollution not CO2 is destroying our habitats along with a population explosion. We are destroying pristine habitats around the world so we can feed growing populations that do not or cannot do modern farming. Most farming in the Southern Hemisphere is subsistent farming. Only recently have many African countries allowed China to assist them with commercial farming and the local populations do not like farming on a massive scale even when it makes their lives easier.
Farm chemical runoff is destroying our oceans along with our governments using the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific for their trash dumps. Governments around the world claim global warming is destroying their countries or states. Reefs are dying off to temperature changes and all of this is basically lies. They want us to pony up for their loose regulations and outright disregard for this planet. Fartm runoff is destroying Australia's great barrier reef as noted in several studies complete with satellite photographic evidence and yet those studies are discarded because they do not fit into the current global money scam about to be played on every human being on the planet. Polluters are going to basically pay the tax, pass on this to the consumer and continue to pollute. Nothing changes ! Absolutely nothing !
I was born in California and nothing has changed there except the population and pollution. Five of the top ten most polluted cities in the USA reside in Calif. Droughts always happen it is a desert but you all now believe global warming caused this. Not at all population caused this. I know I lived in California Venice Beach most of my life until I move out of that crazy place. Sorry for thew ramblings but we are being sold a bunch of lies and many now worship at the altar of man made climate change. What a crock.
This shift from protecting the environment )always a good thing) to protecting the climate (?!?) used to be the most baffling development for me. Now I can suggest with reasonable degree of conviction why this is -- you've said it, too. Of course, they throw in some environmental destruction as a result of the changing climate and make sure to put the focus on the poor but that's the default setting of the narrative, after all.
In 2020 It was published an article by Valentina Zharkova in ”Temperature” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243) and the debates around her thesis were limited to the academic field. Unfortunatelly due to the lack of dialogue between the people (they were only placed in two opposite ”camps” - pro and against something) the general public can see only the side which is covered by mass media. Thank you once again for the article.