Posted on 03/19/2017 8:22:57 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
You probably know that actor Leonardo DiCaprio is a climate activist, and he is trying to persuade the world that climate change is both real and serious. Someone asked me on Twitter what it would take for DiCaprio (for example) to persuade a person like me.
I’ll take a swing at that.
For starters, you must separate the questions of real and serious. The real part refers to the climate models. The serious part refers to economic models. Those are different topics.
If you want to convince me that climate change is real, the best approach is to abandon the current method that packages climate models in a fashion that is identical to well-known scams. (Or hoaxes, if you prefer.)
Let me say this doubly-clear. When I say climate models are packaged in a fashion that is identical to known scams, I am not saying they are scams. I’m saying they are packaged to look exactly like scams. There is no hope for credibility with that communication plan.
To make my point visual, imagine walking into your kitchen and finding an intruder wearing a ski mask and holding a gun. You assume this person is not your friendly neighbor because he is packaged exactly like an armed burglar. If you shoot that intruder, and it turns out to be your neighbor playing a prank, you probably won’t go to jail because it isn’t your fault. The problem was that your neighbor packaged himself to look exactly like an armed burglar.
Climate scientists tell us that there are hundreds of climate models, all somewhat different. I assume that most of them do a good job predicting the past (hindcasting) because otherwise they would not be models at all. Hindcasting is one minimum requirement for being a model in this field, I would assume.
Then science ignores the models that are too far off from observed temperatures as we proceed into the future and check the predictions against reality. Sometimes scientists also “tune” the models to hindcast better, meaning tweaking assumptions. As a non-scientists, I can’t judge whether or not the tuning and tweaking are valid from a scientific perspective. But I can judge that this pattern is identical to known scams. I described the known scams in this post.
And to my skeptical mind, it sounds fishy that there are dozens or more different climate models that are getting tuned to match observations. That doesn’t sound credible, even if it is logically and scientifically sound. I am not qualified to judge the logic or science. But I am left wondering why it has to sound exactly like a hoax if it isn’t one. Was there not a credible-sounding way to make the case?
Personally, I would find it compelling if science settled on one climate model (not dozens) and reported that it was accurate (enough), based on temperature observations, for the next five years. If they pull that off, they have my attention. But they will never convince me with multiple models. That just isn’t possible.
If climate scientists want their climate predictions to be believed, they need to vote on the best model, and stick with it for a few years. If they can’t do that, all I will see is lots of blind squirrels in a field of nuts. Some squirrels will accidentally find some nuts. But it won’t look like science to me because of the way it is packaged.
I do realize that picking one model as the “best” is not something science can do with comfort. It would feel dishonest, I assume, since they don’t know which one will perform best. But if science wants to be persuasive, they need to pick one model. And it needs to be accurate(ish) for the next five years. Nothing else would be persuasive to me.
On the second point, about how serious the alleged problem of climate change is, we have to rely not on scientists but on economists. And economists have zero credibility for long-term forecasts of that type. So the serious part is beyond the reach of persuasion. You can’t get there from here because economic models are no more credible than astrology.
By the way, my educational background is in economics and business. And for years, my corporate jobs involved making complex financial projections about budgets. In other words, I was perpetuating financial fraud within the company, by order of my boss. He told me to pretend my financial projections were real, and I did. But they were not real. My predictions were in line with whatever my boss told me they would be. I “tuned” my assumptions until I got my boss’s answer.
When I tell you it would be hard to convince me that a stranger’s economic model is credible, keep my experience in mind. I’ve seen lots of economic models. I’ve built economic models. In my experience, they are nothing but guesses, bias, and outright fraud.
The only way to convince me that climate change is bad for the economy is to wait until it starts breaking things. If I see it, and scientists agree I am seeing it, I might believe it. But long-term economic predictions can’t get me there.
I remind you that my topic is about persuasion, not the underlying truth of climate change. I don’t have access to the underlying truth because I am not a scientist working in the field. My information comes from strangers that tell me their interpretation of what the scientists are saying. I am as far from science as you can get.
The people who are hallucinating the hardest on this topic are the non-scientists who believe they have done a deep dive into the scientific papers and the climate models and arrived at a rational conclusion. The illusion here is that getting information from other humans is the same as “science.”
Another group of hallucinators believe that they can determine the scientific truth of climate change by counting the number of scientists on each side. But that ignores the fact that science often has the majority on the wrong side. That happens every time a new idea is starting to replace an old one. Darwin did not agree with the consensus when he introduced evolution. Einstein’s ideas were slow to catch on, etc.
When the majority of scientists are on one side, what matters most is the flow rate from one side to the other, not the raw numbers. I need to know which direction the scientists are moving. Are more climate scientists moving toward climate skepticism or away from it? Give me that data and I’ll have something useful. But counting the number on each side during one slice of time is meaningless for persuasion.
My point is that Leonardo DiCaprio would have a tough time persuading me that climate science is both real and serious. But it isn’t his fault, because science has packaged climate science to look like a hoax, and sent him out to sell it. I respect and admire DiCaprio for his heart on this matter, and his effort on behalf of the planet. But science has failed him by giving him hoax-looking sales collateral.
Bkmd
Both kinds of projections are about what pays. Large investment firms can and do make money by manipulating the market. Suppose they tell you stock XYZ which is trading at 50 dollars a share is projected to reach 75 dollars, it might well be because they have just bought some themselves at 50 dollars and want to sell it at 60 dollars. If giving their projection does not move the market up fast enough they may start selling batches of XYZ at cheaper prices to drive it up to a new high of 53, in order to get retail investors excited about it "going up" in the direction of the phony projection. Of course they then can sell at 60 and then short the market hard in order to drive the price down to 45 where they can cover their shorts.
Climate change is simpler. If one wants get paid, they merely need to predict the gloom that the leftwing politicians can use to sell their policies--although the scam may be drying up as the leftwing politicians are losing power over the purse strings of funding. To gain credibility with the public they can't use large sums of money to start a trend in the market, but they can and do massage the data on occasion....but sadly for them they got caught and now the public doesn't trust them....and if the public wants to invest their own money, they would be wise not to trust the projections of the big investment firms and learn to do their own research.
AGW is not packaged as a scam. It is packaged as the Catholic religion pre-Luther. Pope Gore I sells indulgences and leads bishops like Leo. An army of priests disguised as scientists and missionaries as politicians. All set up to spread the faith. And make a lot of money.
Leo is so scared of sea level rise he spends time on a luxury mega yacht. Poor guy. Maybe if he moved to Kansas and lived EXACTLY how he expects us paeons to live that would help. No buying carbon indulgences from Al Gore
Hear ya! Rules for thee and not me!
He's not a climate activist. He's a climate actor-vist.
He just acts like he cares for the environment as he flits around the world on his private jet spewing harmful pollutants into the atmosphere.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/158549646496/how-leonardo-dicaprio-can-persuade-me-on-climate
Sorry about that . . .
In their theory the Arctic is warming the most and warming the most in winter. Looking at the data, that appears to be true. That means less severe Arctic outbreaks, less severe winters here. The usual answer I get is that we need severe winters to kill off mosquitoes or something like that. But malaria and yellow fever and other mosquito-born diseases used to be endemic here up to the Arctic. They were tempered by severe winters but came back every spring. The bottom line is we don't need severe winters to eliminate mosquito-born diseases, we have much better methods mostly related to economic progress and decent border health screening.
Finally I ask what the actual damage is. There is nothing they can point to except allegedly worse weather. The problem is that it is not worse. We have yet to repeat the dust bowl temperatures or conditions here in the US. Then they point to sea level rise. But that's an inch per decade which matches up with previous natural rises. That rate will fall again as it always has, naturally.
He’s a wannabe journalist. Trump should grant him an interview just to anger the ‘real’ journalists.
Here- I’ll convince you it is a LIE that man is causing climate change- very quickly- numbers don’t lie
CO2 in the atmosphere as a direct result of man amounts to just 0.00136% of the atmosphere- There is nowhere near enough CO2 to cause climate change- nowhere near- Period
Ask leo to explain how just 0.00136% of the atmosphere can possibly capture enough heat to cause global climate change-
The math is as follows:
CO2 and greenhouse gases add up to 0.04% of the atmosphere- man is responsible for just 3.4% of that 0.04% meaning that CO2 as a direct result of man takes up just 0.00136% of the atmosphere
3.4% of 0.04% = 0.00136%
Sorry folks- The CO2 by man is nowhere near the amount needed to trap heat and cause global climate change-
There is no thick blanket of CO2 surrounding the globe trapping heat-
To drive this point home- Take an 8x11 sheet of paper- drop a pencil tip on the sheet so that it makes a dot- There is your CO2 volume in relation to the atmosphere-
Leo is a liar- either that or he is ignorant and has been deceived-
Manmade Glo-BULL Warming and Cli-MIGHT Change may or may not be occurring. The former is questionable and the latter has been happening since the Earth formed Billions of years ago.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter unless there is some 100% effective resolution that Mankind can implement to prevent one or both scenarios from taking place.
Just to be clear, there isn’t. If Man is causing these calamities, the only solution is to eliminate Man from the equation and see if things suddenly return to what Leftists think is the norm.
Yes, any sane person knows that cannot and will not happen, so President Trump and anyone Posting on Free Republic have been proven right once again.
Ask Leo how much air by volume that 0.00136% of the atmosphere heats up- then compare his answer (provided he can) to the weight of the atmosphere which stand around 6 quadrillion tons
If he has any shame at all he will decline to answer because the answer would show how silly it is to keep claiming the earth is warming because of man (And remind leo, or inform him, that the small amount of heat that gets trapped then released again quickly reaches equilibrium because it gets massively overwhelmed by the cooler surrounding massive 6 quadrillion ton atmosphere
[[Manmade Glo-BULL Warming and Cli-MIGHT Change may or may not be occurring.]]
do the math- it isn’t
The only actor that I’ve seen “walk the talk,” is Ed Begley Jr.
How does flying coach reduce your carbon footprint over first class, I would think each person on the flight would share equal
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a distant 2nd.
[[There is a process to measure a gas’s absorption ability called atomic absorption spectrometry. Suspicious of the entire global warming hysteria, atmospheric physicist James A. Peden put carbon dioxide through just such an analysis. Based on where and how much of the sun’s total radiation output, which consists of light and other wavelengths not visible to human eyes, Peden estimates that carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere takes in no more than 8 percent of the sun’s total radiation.
It’s the same percentage for heat radiated back from Earth. “Man-made CO2 doesn’t appear physically capable of absorbing much more than two-thousandths of the radiated heat passing upward through the atmosphere,”]]
[[OSU Stadium holds 100,000 Buckeye Fans and atmospheric CO2 is 400 ppm. If every Buckeye Fan represents one atmospheric molecule, then 40 Buckeye Fans would represent atmospheric CO2. Man however is not responsible for all the atmospheric CO2, and is responsible for at most 15 of those 40 molecules of CO2. Man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 is the equivalent of 15 Buckeye Fans in OSU Stadium.
CO2 is 0.00004 or 0.04% of the atmosphere. Is it plausible that “activating” 1 out of every 2,500 molecules in the atmosphere can actually result in a material temperature change?
Does it seem plausible that “thermalizing” 1 out of every 2,500 molecules can make a material difference upon the remaining 2,499? Especially when its energy if consistent with a black body of temperature -80 degrees Celsius?]]
This is a great, non-political, argument against climate “consensus,” showing the science to be a setup “argument to convince” while having nothing to do with science or truth. Very well done.
The only Manmade part of this is the Bullshit controversy.
Without First Class, they could stuff in more Bodies.
More Bodies, smaller Carbon footprint per person.
Better Liberal solution, outlaw Airplanes.
DeCaprio should only be allowed to bike, skateboard or walk anywhere he needs to go,
OK,take a jumbo....777/787/747/A380.On a square foot of floor space basis the Business Class and First Class areas of such aircraft could hold many more seats if configured the way Coach is typically configured.So instead of an A380 carrying 700 "Coach" passengers it's carrying 450 Coach,30 Business Class and 10 First Class.
So,490 people spewing "X" amount of pollution into the atmosphere rather than 700.From there the math is easy.
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