Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Whatever

A Brief Restatement of the Obvious for a Clueless World


Item 1: The heat capacity of the ocean is big compared to the heat capacity of the atmosphere.


Item 2: The carbon dioxide capacity of the ocean is big compared to the carbon dioxide capacity of the atmosphere.


Item 3: Heat and mass transfer across the atmosphere/ocean interface are not independent and are not simple.

Personal experience re Item 3: I have spent a lot of the last six years trying to get my head around heat and mass transfer across the atmosphere/farm dam interface. 

3a: It is really not simple.

3b: Even a failed physicist like me can see that the semi-empirical models of it in the 'climate science' literature are dodgy-as.

3c: I have a model: it is too hard to test in farm dams so we have gone back to 44-gallon drums of water.
3c.i: We haven't got data good enough to test it in six months yet.
3c.ii: 44-gallon drums of water are simpler than the ocean.


Item 4: When I was an undergraduate, when we talked about the weather, we talked about strange attractors and the butterfly effect and the essential unpredictability of complex systems and the impossibility of drawing a line between weather and climate since they showed the same self-similar pattern on all scales. Now, for the entire lifetime of today's undergraduates, the world has been running around like a headless chook pretending the climate can be modelled by y = mx + b.  

Problem?

7 comments:

HelmutSchiretz said...

Re: item 2 - IPCC special report may be worth a read - which pretty much supports your statement...

https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srccs/SRCCS_Chapter6.pdf

World Ocean Review might be of interest to you and your readers ?

http://worldoceanreview.com/en/authors-and-contributors/

HelmutSchiretz said...

For what it's worth Subjective Logic as described by Prof. Audun Joseng http://folk.uio.no/josang/ may be worth applying to the opposing hypotheses


He introduces the concept as follows:

In standard logic, propositions are considered to be either true or false, and in probabilistic logic the arguments are expressed as a probability in the range [0, 1]. However, a fundamental aspect of the human condition is that nobody can ever determine with absolute certainty whether a proposition about the world is true or false, or determine the probability of something with 100% certainty. In addition, whenever the truth of a proposition is assessed, it is always done by an individual, and it can never be considered to represent a general and objective belief. This indicates that important aspects are missing in the way standard logic and probabilistic logic capture our perception of reality, and that these reasoning models are more designed for an idealised world than for the subjective world in which we are all living.

As an introduction the manual on his web site is freely downloadable and I recommend the following journal article as an introduction

Abductive Reasoning with Uncertainty

Chris Fellows said...

If I recall correctly, 'abductive reasoning' was a coinage of Charles Sanders Peirce, and as a Peirce fanboy I am a big fan of the concept. I will check out the links...

HelmutSchiretz said...

Good on you Chris - firstly because this is new ground for me and I 'kind of absorbed it like the sponge that I am"

I have to say that the "spin" makes absolute sense to me - especially as a tool to evaluate "opposing models" at least presenting them against each other on the same 'level playing field" - if you get my drift ?

Everything theory, concept, opposing hypothesis, data analysis etc. - call it what you like - that I've read that you have posted on your blog is in my humble opinion has a 'validity' associated with it (or them) ...

What I'm not about is being at logger heads with you either as climate change promoter or skeptic !

I agree that science is not about consensus - leave that to the pollies ...

As an electronics engineer my comfort zone is in Boolean Logic - with out which we would never have had the com-putters we so much rely on these days for our Google obsession amongst other things ... which as you are well aware drove De Morgan mad and he suicided ...

Mathematicians are so sensitive - aren't they ?

But De Morgan was proven right and that stimulated Turing - whose ultimate demise was somewhat SAD !!!

But I digress - this concept of subjective logic intrigues me as I see it's applicability - most particularly to my analysis of of my current thesis data (eventually) ...

Instead of aimlessly crunching numbers - the concept presents me with a way forward - pls pass on other interested parties - you know who I mean ;-)

HelmutSchiretz said...

Just as an aside - what brought on my interest in adductive reasoning - you might well ask - or not ?

FYI - QI today on the ABC - that damn useless box in the corner taking up room.

Question: What was the methodology that made Sherlock Holmes such as successful solver of crime ?

Wrong answer: Deduction ...

HelmutSchiretz said...

Dr Karl is at it again - talk about changing your tune ...


http://www.abc.net.au/science/drkarl/default.htm

HelmutSchiretz said...

Advanced Sankey diagrams can integrate material flows (such as water and waste) together with any
variances in ecological quality of the materials involved in the processes