To maybe move the discussion on from the origins of Covid, I thought I’d write a post about detection and attribution. It is somewhat motivated by a brief dicsussion withTed Nordhaus, from the Breakthrough Institute, who suggested that a good rule of thumb for attribution studies is that they are consistent with “observable trends in climate related phenomena.” The problem, as pointed out in this nice Realclimate post, is that detection and attribution are actually two separate things and there may well be situations where it’s possible to understand the causes (the attribution) of an event without this being associated with some kind of longer-term trend.
In fact, we might actually expect some extreme events to become attributable, well before any trend emerges. You could, of course, decide to be cautious and not make any attribution claims until some kind of trend emerges, but that is almost certainly going to unplay the link between anthropogenically-driven climate change and extreme weather events. So, a decision to do so is essentially equivalent to those who claim that climate change is already super-changing every single extreme weather event. It’s an explicit decision to minimise the impact of climate change. It’s also somewhat ironic, given that it’s often presented in response to suggestions that others have exaggerated the influence of climate change.
On a similar note, there are also some who argue that we should only really consider the marginal impact of climate change. In other words, if we experience a heatwave, then we frame things in terms of how hot it would have been in the absence of climate change and, therefore, how much climate change contributed to the event.
The problem is that it is often these marginal changes that have the most impact. If we live in regions with infrastructure that is designed to cope with a certain level of, for example, precipitation, then the impact of climate change could lead to events that the local infrastructure can’t cope with very well. Essentially, there could be thresholds beyond which extreme events have a lot of impact, and below which the impact is minimal. Climate change could act to push events past these thresholds.
Hence, again, deciding that we should only frame the influence of climate change in terms of the marginal effect it has on extreme events can underplay the impact that these changes are likely to have. It also runs the risk of ignoring that climate change can influence both the frequency and intensity of extreme events.
How we choose to frame things like this probably illustrates our views about the significance of climate change. If you think that we should only really trust attribution studies if they’re associated with some detectable trend, then you probably think that variability will dominate over the changes due to climate change. If you think we should only frame the influence of climate change in terms of the marginal effect it has on extreme events, then you probably think the impact will also be marginal.
Of course, you could make similar comments about those who make strong claims about the influence of climate change on extreme weather events. Personally, I think it’s complicated and we should be willing to acknowledge that. We can do detection and attribution and also try to understand the causal factors that influenced a single extreme weather event. We can both consider the marginal impact of climate change on extreme events and acknowledge that these marginal changes could have a large impact.
We could also acknowledge that how we choose to frame the influence of climate change on extreme weather events is probably strongly influenced by our overall view about the significance of climate change. If you’re choosing to frame things in ways that will probably minimise the impact of climate change then maybe don’t get upset if people point this out. Have the courage to own it.
...and Then There's Physics 
I found this response to Ted Nordhaus’ framing quite amusing, although I would probably have written BadTake Institute 🙂
“observable trends in climate related phenomena.”
because, of course, trend analysis has never been a controversial subject in the debate/discussion on climate change, and therefore is something we can all rely on ;o)
physics > statistics >= chimps pulling numbers from a bucket.
Coincidentally:
What the science says about California’s record–setting snow
The paper:
Dropsonde Observations of Total Integrated Water Vapor Transport within North Pacific Atmospheric Rivers
Damn! Global warming made it snow. Who knew?
How does this follow?
*Framing* the change as, well, the *change* doesn’t mean that the itself will be “marginal”, nor that you believe it will be “marginal”.🤷
¹ And, just to be clear, we seem to be using “marginal” in two senses in the blogpost quote; first, in a sort of differential calculus/economics way, then secondly in one of the dictionary meanings, e.g. “of minor importance, significance, relevance, or effect”. Not a deep insight, but the the way the sentence is written, it sort of invites the reader to assume that the “marginal” change will tend to imply small, no?
Anyhow, the preference to frame the changes in terms of the “marginal” change from a “no climate change baseline” doesn’t presuppose that that marginal change (especially over time) is itself small. Does it?
Later in the blogpost you say:
This, of course, is what I am saying. Do “both”!
But why are we assuming that “both” isn’t what Patrick Brown and Ted Nordhaus are *already* considering? Because I am quite sure they are.🤷
I suppose a lot hinges on your “acknowledge” point. Which, if not done, does mean the “marginal” analysis can be misused by those who will always be prone to picking up and misusing analysis for whatever purposes. But it shouldn’t change the way you frame it, should it? At least not scientifically (as opposed to effectiveness for propoganda² value?)?🤔
² I’m intending to use the word non-perjoratively
hmm, checking with my dictionary app, “propoganda” doesn’t seem to have a generous use. I meant instead roughly something like “effective and motivating messaging for a concept you desire to convey”.🤷
Rust,
Indeed.
Possibly so, but I’m less convinced than you are. Ted seemed to explicitly claim, or at least seemed to suggest, that we wouldn’t really be able to detect how climate change influenced the impact of extreme events.
However, the other point I would make (or was trying to make) is that if you choose to stress the marginal impact of climate change, it will probably then be interpreted as implying that the impact will also be marginal. Of course, you could be much more careful and make very, very clear that this doesn’t mean that the impact will be marginal, in which case maybe your initial framing would avoid stressing the marginal impact on the extreme event.
Another factor that I may not express all that clearly, is that stressing the marginal impact can underplay how climate change can shift the underlying distribution. For example, even if climate change doesn’t influence the variance, a shift in the distribution itself can result in an event that might have been virtually impossible in the absence of climate change.
How do you frame that? Is it simply an event that would have been slightly less intense in the absence of climate change, or is it an event that was essentially impossible in the absence of climate change. I think the PNW heatdome and the 40C temperatures in the UK might fall into this category.
Additionally, this shift of the distribution could also mean that events that would have been extreme in the absence of climate change, become much more common. Again, how do you frame this? Are they simply events that would have been slightly less intense in the absence of climate change, or has climate change made extreme more frequent? I think how these are framed will influence the interpretation of the significance of climate change.
I’m writing too much, but I’m not necessarily suggesting that one framing is right and the other is wrong. I don’t actually think that’s easy to define. I do think, though, that it’s worth acknowledging, or considering, how the way one chooses to frame these kind of things will both be influence how people interpret the significance of climate change and will also be influenced by your own biases.
As a rough rule of thumb, if Marc Morano chooses to RT your tweets, maybe you should reflect on your framing.
Rust,
I knew what you meant. I think this is an important point. Any framing is likely chosen to be consistent with some kind of underlying message. I just think people should own this, rather than trying to suggest that they’re determine the objectively correct way to frame this. I don’t think that actually exists.
Here’s an old Realclimate post that discusses some of these issues in more detail.
It ends with
The Hoerling and Mass metric is essentially just highlighting the marginal effect of climate change on some event.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/08/extreme-metrics/
Again, I may express this poorly, but another reason I have some trouble with primarily highlighting the marginal impact of climate change is that the emergence of these events is chaotic. In other words, if we have an extreme event that is intensified by climate change, this doesn’t mean that in the absence of climate change the same event would have emerged, but it would have just been slightly less intense. In the absence of climate change, the emergence of weather events would probably have been completely different. Yes, a slightly less intense event may have emerged at some other time/place, but there’s no obvious reason to think that it would have been at the same time/place.
So, I tend to think that thinking in terms of the frequency of these events and how this might be influenced by climate change makes more sense than thinking in terms of the marginal impact of climate change. That’s just my view, of course.
Actually now I’ve downloaded it I see that the paper is an old one quantifying the “airborne rivers”. The Nature article is just asking experts for expert opinion.
So you could say it explains the high precipitation involved in that heavy snow, but as to why it was snow not rain, you have to get into not just “more water vapour due to warming”, but when and where the “river” flowed, which may be more to do with polar amplification and changes to the jetstream than with Clausius-Clapeyron.
The day after Peter Thiel tells the startups he finances to pull out of Silicon Valley Bank, a bank run occurs:
https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-founders-fund-pulled-cash-svb-before-collapse-report-2023-3
We may never know if the bank could have survived a slower bank run, but we know that Peter’s call did not help. Should we attribute the collapse to Peter’s call? No. Responsibility does not work that way.
Peter might have been reckless, but he did not make SBV buy 10y notes when the Fed was about to raise interest rates. Peter did not relax banking regulations, teh Donald did. Orange Man created (or rather reinstated) financial conditions in which (natural) reckless behaviour could put the system at risk. And of course reckless behaviour occurred, because venture capitalists go fast and break things for a living. They got bailed out, presumably because GRRRRRROWTH needs tech.
In the analogy, regulations make the climate, and the bank run shows extreme swings of natural variability. We know which wags which. If worse bank runs are coming, perhaps regulators ought to work on tightening the rules instead of washing their hands and say that VCs will VC.
Come to think of it, I wonder what could prevent proponents of some natural variability metric to go back to the time where the Antarctica was a paradise:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/17/antarctica-tropical-climate-co2-research
In Climateball, nothing is really unprecedented.
I don’t think there is a good or better way to define this. Choices are made based on one’s reasoning as we all can see by the above post.
For now, I would entertain doing all three or perhaps using a central value with associated uncertainty bounds.
None of this controversy matters much as long as we keep on making great progress on reducing gh gas emissions. I figure keep our eyes on that prize and watch the CO2 numbers plummet back to something close to 350 ppm, then we can take a deep breath, pat ourselves on the back and let some folks get their phd’s arguing about the academic nuances of attribution etc.
I wonder if we should be cautious about taking the bait being offered to argue about arcane details? Tastes great? Less filling? Effective framing and crowds out discussion on the harder problem of our progress on reducing ghg emissions. But, as I say, there is some positive news on that front. Electric vehicles are having a moment and it can only be a matter of time until we are all gliding around quietly on autopilot in our ev’s as we watch the news about falling CO2 accumulation numbers in the atmosphere. We should probably give a little thought to making sure we don’t drop those numbers so fast that we create new unforeseen consequences with a too-rapid decline.
Doing great. February 2023 CO2 number is well under 421 ppm. I don’t even bother to track CH4 numbers anymore. It’s a waste of time because CH4 doesn’t stick around. It’s a diversion from nailing down our global success with CO2.
I was pleased to see that Biden approved drilling in the Arctic. We should be able to burn petrochemicals from that region if we need them to keep the global CO2 level from dropping too rapidly. This seems like the kind of service that the USA can provide to the rest of the world because we have experience in global leadership and because we are a very generous nation.
Cheers
Mike
@-sbm
” I figure keep our eyes on that prize and watch the CO2 numbers plummet back to something close to 350 ppm…”
might need to keep your eyes open for the prize to appear…
And it is going to take at least another year as oil production is predicted to increase.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55159
“We forecast that global petroleum production will increase by 1% (1.1 million b/d) from 2022 to 2023. The United States and OPEC account for most of the increase in global production”
Willard, 100 million years ago, the part of the Gondwana that would become Antarctica enjoyed a tropical climate mainly because it was in the tropics- the present South Pole may have meandered across the equator.
OTOH continental drift didn’t stop Earth from snowballing for a hundred million years in the Neoproterozoic era
You may have a point, Russell:
Our Son of Lobster forgot the date.
Still no production-quality models available for extreme climate regimes such as El Nino, of which the Pacific Ocean and thus the world may be entering this year. The frame is too small to include the elephant in the room.
Thanks for your replies.
Lots of good points, but I’ll just (primarily) focus on this one:
Yes, I agree. It *isn’t* easy to define.
But I think in such a situation, it’s better to have several ways of interpreting such attribution laid out to the public.
Yes, this puts a perhaps unreasonable onus/expectation on the public and policymakers to understand quite nuanced issues, concepts and statistics. And not just pick the interpretation/presentation they find the most congenial or convenient, nor shut down in overload and be unable to make a decision.
I don’t know how to thread that needle in a world of attention spans/opportunities of 280-character tweets or 20-second tiktok’s.🤷
But I don’t see anyway of getting around it. Because I don’t think we’re yet anywhere near the sustained effort that will be required of the public to decarbonize. Which will need to be sustained for decades. So you need their buy-in. And if they end up sensing that the statistics were deliberately shaded so that they were more likely to make a predetermined sacrifice, *that* will backfire. That much, I am pretty sure of.
I am often reminded of a quote Martin Weitzman gave on a panel about carbon pricing vs cap & trade, the latter of which tends to hide the costs from the public, at least on the first round. And at one point Weitzman says:
And, although, in this case, he’s talking about levelling with the public that the medicine may be bitter, the flip side is levelling with how bad the disease might or might not be, where “extreme events” is standing in on this side of the analogy.
But the key takeaway I get from him is that you put it to the public as plainly as possible – no sugar-coating, no exaggeration, no withholding important information or interpretation – “and letting them decide, as it were”.
Because, decide they ultimately will. And, as I said earlier, if they suspect they’ve been played in some way, they will not keep playing themselves.🤷
So, back more to the topic at hand, I think it is important to give the public both favourable and unfavourable framings (from the point of view of the persuader).🤷
I’m reminded of prior work by Patrick Brown where he critiqued a published analysis that claimed that 75% of the damages from Hurricane Harvey were attributable to climate change.
(I think I am emphasizing the second of each of the next two pairs of tweets, if WordPress displays as I recall:)
(starting a new post to continue)
(Weitzman <1:00 minute clip; full context available if you go to full clip)
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxJGFKwf5IQgfYqaQlwOZsscWEoDeFsuFv
Like, I get the idea that if a levee is breached or not, and it was at a height that basically it was virtually impossible that a climate-normal storm could have breached it, then 100% of the damages on the other side are attributable to the climate-influenced storm. The “discrete” issue Patrick is highlighting. But I think he’s correct in the way he suggests that it’s incorrect to attribute 75% of Harvey’s damage to climate change.🤷
And I think this is the case where it’s better to “level with the public” about different ways of looking at this. Especially, say, the Houston/American public.🤷
I think Patrick is completely genuine in his concerns. Did you listen to his interview with Peter Irvine and Jesse Reynolds on the Challenging Climate podcast? Interesting to hear how he arrives where he is.
And, as I think you’re aware, he was a PhD student and is a frequent collaborator of Ken Caldeira.
I find it hard seeing that he isn’t completely good faith here. (Even if his research – like the recent commentary on the IPCC AR6 WGII agricultural yield impacts – gets picked up by activists. But what’s the alternative? Hiding it away? 🤷)
I’ve said enough. Dog wants a walk!
Good faith or not, this does not work:
Source: https://patricktbrown.org/2022/02/14/overestimating-the-human-influence-on-the-economic-costs-of-extreme-weather-events/
Of course cancer has costs even if you don’t have cancer. In fact many cancer costs come before contracting cancer. Just think of cancer screening campaigns.
Screening for Cancer, whether prostrate, cervical or breast, is cost constrained by restricting it to the age group where the likelihood of detecting a case early enough to intervene effectively is high enough to justify the cost of the screening program in added years of quality life.
Applying screening earlier might save a few people from a painful early death, but the calculation is too few to justify the expenditure.
The parallel with protecting against weather events should be obvious. We build to protect the most for the least cost. Some extreme events will exceed our built protections but the calculation is that those events will be rare enough to tolerate the risk.
If subsequent epidemiological information shows that it is worth screening earlier because the incidence has changed, then usually this is done. The tension is always between medics who favour earlier screening, and the bean-counters who object to the cost.
In some cases such as alcohol induced liver disease and firearm suicide the social cost of regulating the cause is considered too high, so the associated morbidity is tolerated.
It appears this is the current situation with fossil fuel induced climate change.
Rust,
This wasn’t intended to become a discussion about one individual. I agree with some of the criticisms that you highlight. I also don’t think “good faith” means not “open for criticism”. I would hope that’s the case, otherwise I would worry about my own positions.
I also agree that it’s better to level with the public, than not do so. However, the somewhat more complex issue is when people choose to level with the public in some circumstances, but not in others. Some of those who vocally criticise the IPCC will claim they’re doing so because it’s such an important institution that it’s crucial that it gets things right. However, the general response to their criticism is to dismiss it entirely, and they must see that this is the response. It doesn’t seem to then influence the way in which they do so (I’m not suggesting that this is Patrick, to be clear).
I guess my overall point is about how things are framed and, consequently, how these framings are then interpreted. If your framing seems to appeal to a particular audience, it’s worth considering is this is consistent with the message you’re trying to get across. If it isn’t, then there may be another way to frame it that gets the same information across, but in a way that isn’t interpreted sub-optimally. Not always easy, though.
Despite the fact that was an April 1 joke, Jordan commenting on it lead to increased awareness that the Trans-Canada highway allows bicycling along most stretches, especially the desolate ones. I remember reading about this long ago, when I was wondering if the USA allowed bicycles on any freeway for RAAM competitions. There’s also a connecting path called the Great Trail or Trans-Canada Trail which looks amazing. Nothing official like this in the USA.
https://transcanadahighway.com/traveltips/going-across-canada-by-bicycle/packing-for-bicycle-trip-on-the-trans-canada-highway/
Willard likely knows more about the possibilities
Does every so-called weather event fall under the rubric climate change? Yes.
Or is it just extreme events? No.
And when we talk about extreme events are we dealing with the tails of distributions? Yes.
I seem to have some problem with this whole detection and attribution subject. Meaning, if you don’t know the tail distributions with significance, how does one do detection and attribution to begin with in the 1st place?
The logic appears to be inherently circular.
From what I can see some apply Granger causality:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/96/12/bams-d-15-00105.1.xml
It was a cite from the Carbonbrief post, in which we can read the caveats:
Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-cost-of-extreme-weather-due-to-climate-change-is-severely-underestimated/
Going all-in against such study might not bode well for the whole business of normalizing costs, which our Honest Broker (now that he identifies as one on teh tweeter we can call him that) tried to corner.
An example would seem to be in order.
Are ocean waves (water waves) getting larger/smaller in size (heights and/or periods) as both a function of location and time?
If you cannot demonstrate actual changes occurring over time then you cannot demonstrate a changing climate of whatever observables you are trying to demonstrate a changing climate of whatever observables you are trying to demonstrate … ad infinitum ad nauseum.
Observables are physical quantities that have the units of some combination of mass, length or time (to name but a few physical properties in the SI system).
Things like wind speed or fetch. Seeing as AOGCM’s don’t include water waves, it is kind of hard to imagine how climate change affects or is changing ocean currents, for example.
Oh and not interested in economics at all.
“Our Son of Lobster forgot the date.”
Willard, is he related to Lobster on his mother’s or his father’s side?
All Google offers is this splendid HuffPost lede :
Son Of Lobster Boy Discusses Dad’s Grisly Murder On ‘Freakshow’
> Are ocean waves (water waves) getting larger/smaller in size (heights and/or periods) as both a function of location and time?
One possible answer, by selecting “Are ocean waves (water waves) getting larger/smaller in size (heights and/or periods) as both a function of location and time?” and right-clicking on “Search the web”:
https://theconversation.com/what-does-climate-change-mean-for-extreme-waves-in-80-of-the-world-we-dont-really-know-197526
Was it a question or an example, Everett?
***
Two different lobsters, Russell.
Willard,
You did read that entire article.
For others, please read the entire article that Willard posted a link.
Those interested in economics might appreciate:
Uncertainty is neither contrarians’ nor reinsurers’ friend.
One does wonder if Willard understands what depth limited wave height means though. 😀
Willard, do you understand what depth limited wave heights even means?
No training and no education and no experience does not hold water to those who do.
Does someone here understand the difference in long traveled swell waves (surfers love these by the way), and their propagated wave heights with distance versus say locally generated wind waves (meaning both tropical and extratropical storms)? One is usually an order of magnitude larger except in nearshore conditions conducive to say surfing (you would be pretty stupid if you were to go out during near field wave generation, for example).
So 30 meter deep water waves are going to be 30.3 meters in 2100? With an 80% uncertainty range, meaning we don’t know if they will even be larger to begin with in the 1st place. I can design for an infinite increase in wave height, if I know that the waves are depth limited, meaning that they will only break in even deeper water then they did before.
Of course, I have never recommended building in the coastal zone, and that predates popular climate change, by a decade or so.
One does wonder why Everett never recommended building in the coastal zone when we don’t know if or when AGW will make waves higher.
Sadly, insurers can’t afford to wait:
https://www.canadianunderwriter.ca/insurance/6-to-10-of-canadians-arent-insurable-for-natcats-industry-1004231463/
The real world isn’t powered by High Expectation Scientists.
Thanks, Willard . Didn’t suspect the GLCP was communing with creatures as far down the left side of the bell curve as lobsters, and mistook you reference for an arcane Newfie joke
Everett asked:
The only waves that matter are the enormous subsurface thermocline waves that can extend 100’s of meters in height, bringing cold water near to the surface and thereby causing El Nino or La Nina episodes depending on the phase of the pattern. Understanding why they can get so high is an exercise in Newtonian physics — the thermocline separates 2 layers of slightly different densities so that gravitational effects are magnified by orders of magnitude. The lower denser layer will create massive wavefronts into the less dense upper layer from any inertial change, as if it was on the moon.
Global warming will likely have little impact on this since the density difference between layers won’t change much — and is the wrong sign in any case.
It comes from an old culture war story, featuring serotonin and hierarchies:
https://theconversation.com/psychologist-jordan-peterson-says-lobsters-help-to-explain-why-human-hierarchies-exist-do-they-90489
Since then Jordan has more or less become a preacher, “the Son of Lobster” is born.
Et coquebatur vivus etiam?
The other risk for societies to get ready to pay for aren’t the extreme events, they’re becoming the increasingly normal events for which we aren’t configured.
Tidal flooding is still sometimes called “nuisance” flooding, but as it increases in frequency and depth there are costs in lost productivity as people can’t get to work, and also there are the health/mortality risks if, for example, an ambulance can’t get to your home, and the property risks if you have a fire during the same non-extreme flooding event.
Your property might not be flooded on this sunny high-tide day but you still can’t drive elsewhere. And there’s also the eventual costs from the accelerated damage to whatever infrastructure is on the early end of rising waters in an area.
“Rising seas will cut off many properties before they’re flooded
Along the US coasts, many properties will lose access to essential services.”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/rising-seas-will-cut-off-many-properties-before-theyre-flooded/
(Reminds me we might want to bring back the boat-cars that were part of the water show at the 1964 Worlds Fair)
The ArsTechnica article notes: “These risks are also spread unevenly. For example, the risk of isolation is higher in Maine than in Florida, although Florida’s larger population means that more people would be at risk.”
Maine might also get an increase in lobsters in the road, so there’s that benefit.
@=EFS
“Seeing as AOGCM’s don’t include water waves, it is kind of hard to imagine how climate change affects or is changing ocean currents,”
Is it ?
Waves, and any assocaited ocean currents, are the secondary effect that dissipates energy in the air-water interface. If there is more energy at the surface, the waves will be bigger. If there is less they will be smaller. If there is the same energy at the surface the waves will be the same.
I am sure there are innumerable complexities, but to a first order of spherical cows in a vacuum shirley this is right ?
The problem with the lobster argument, Willard, is that the last common ancestor of us and lobsters is a microscopic worm:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=inline&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005502.g001
And yes, the modern Isodiametra it does have its version of serotonin, so probably everything up the tree has or had the equivalent of serotonin. IOW everything with legs, and a bunch of worms and stuff without legs. So you could choose literally any behaviour from any motile animal other than a jellyfish in place of Lobsterboy’s choice.
Which makes it not so much useless, as worse than useless.
Or you could note the very different social behaviour between chimpanzees and bonobos, which are far more closely related to each other than they are to us, and conclude that claims of neurochemical determinism are just so much horseshit.
Indeed any sort of genetic behavioural determinism is horseshit.
As a percentage of the population, humanity has got, on average, less violent since our hunter-gatherer days (half a dozen males killing a male from a neighbouring group in a territorial-boundary dispute may sound small, but could represent 60% of the adult males from one group killing 10% of the adult males in another group in a single incident). Nowadays we’d call that genocide.
And humans engage in less intra-species violence than the average primate. The phylogenetic roots of human lethal violence. (Free read-only version). Of course genetic determinism isn’t everything – modern humans and bonobos, vs. their much closer relative, chimps. Fig. 1 has the detail. Some bats are violent but most are not. Large carnivores, unsurprisingly, are. Rhinos, famously aggressive, stand out among ungulates.
Thanks, Dave.
There’s really no need to appeal to our chemical essence to observe that societies tend to rest on something like partial orders, e.g.:
Keep calm and climb up the science ladder.
izen,
As usual, I sort of stepped into it, so to speak. As I slowly back out of the hole I’ve dug, with respect to detection and attribution, and to answer your question somewhat, I think that the AOGCM’s could apply a shear stress at the ocean surface to model the wind field and thus drive wind induced surface currents.
I also believe that if the waves are larger, then it stands to reason that the wind fields will be larger by 2100.
Social comparisons better than knowledge in climate change mitigation interventions
In interventions designed to encourage more sustainable and climate-smart behaviour, examples of what other people are doing and financial ‘carrots’ are more important than providing knowledge and facts. This has been shown in an international second-order meta-analysis of more than four hundred primary studies. However, all types of climate mitigation interventions have a relatively small effect on how people behave.
https://www.gu.se/en/news/social-comparisons-better-than-knowledge-in-climate-change-mitigation-interventions
Meanwhile back in London, the Prime Minister has just reminded the world what made the late founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation tick:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2023/04/nigel-lawson-rip-epiphany.html
I had to log in by FB last time, now Twitter log in is working.
b Fagan said:
News searches over the last 2 years will find many pieces citing NASA covering the topic of an anticipated enhanced surge flooding due to the 18.6 year lunar nodal “wobble”. This is one of the original NASA JPL press releases:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/study-projects-a-surge-in-coastal-flooding-starting-in-2030s
There are essentially two strong components in the long-period lunar tide — the fortnightly Mf tide and a modulation of 18.6 years in it’s declination with respect to the ecliptic. If one looks at the strongest torque on the Earth’s rotation rate, and therefore it’s length-of-day (LOD) adjustment, it’s these two factors. Next strongest is the monthly Mm perigean tide, which creates characteristic beat frequencies in the LOD. Based on daily results since accurate measurements started in 1962, models fitted to the LOD derivative attain 0.973 correlation coefficient level.
That’s essentially the inertial change (dLOD/dt) applied to the thermocline. Applied at twice a year impulses during the most metastable dimictic periods of thermocline overturning, this will create step waves of momentum over the next 6 months. So that semi-annually, the tidal forcing can constructively or destructively interfere depending on the phase of the summed factors at that instant. This leads to a period on average of 3.8 years with an 18.6 year modulation. This is how the 3.8 year period forcing compares to the ENSO NINO4 index.
Regardless of whether climate change is detectably driving increased damages, what it is definitely driving is adaptation costs.
Look at building standards e.g. in the UK for nationally important infrastructure, and they assume significant sea level rise among other things, adding significantly to the cost of developing coastal infrastructure. Flood management infrastructure also has to be engineered to cope with reasonable-worst-case expectations.
These costs are all pretty explicit.
And so are the increased insurance costs for climate-exposed infrastructure. It might be that all the actuaries have got it wrong, and things will turn out OK. But expected risk imposes real costs on societies, because it forces us to adapt, or if that is too expensive, retreat from uninsurable locations.
In other news:
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/we-have-to-be-realistic-quebec-premier-says-burying-hydro-lines-underground-too-expensive-1.6346480
Of course François Premier would rather prioritize His promised tax cuts.
Things like burying power lines are part of the general trend of reduced tolerance for risk as countries become wealthier, as well as a response to increased threat. Hard to tell these things apart.
If Quebec does bury all its distribution lines, and power gets more reliable, we can be sure this will be rolled into claims that climate damages are actually decreasing. (I’m thinking they’ll end up with pervasive household batteries and most cars able to supply backup power though).
In the latest RealClimate on the IPCC Summary for Policymakers Gavin Schmidt is rightfully and righteously scathing about the communication failure. I won’t say much here, but here are a couple of extracts:
“My concern is that the IPCC stubbornly has stuck to a format which so far hasn’t worked” – then then (imnsho) he gets polite and pulls his punches.
“If there is a slight chance that a term can be misunderstood, then it probably will be misunderstood.”
Still and all, for technically minded people, it’s a good critique. ChatGPT, as he points out, does a better job (I loathe it for various reasons which I won’t divert to here).
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/04/the-summary-for-policymakers-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change-sixth-assessment-reports-synthesis/
The problem with the lobster argument, Willard, is that the last common ancestor of us and lobsters is a microscopic worm:
wrt the lobster argument
I have yet to find anyone who can recapitulate it
go ahead, your wrong and cant do it.
even if you search youtube to remind yourself
questions for discussion.
is western culture and society based on hierarchy?
what maintains the patriarchy? power or competence?
does serotonin play a role in establishing hierarchies in primates or other animals?
what would socrates say?
Incidentally, just came across this:
My response to this:
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/06/13/the-climate-religion/
Pope Francis, in this case, makes perfect sense.
> I have yet to find anyone who can recapitulate it
First hit:
https://www.shortform.com/blog/jordan-peterson-and-lobsters-12-rules
The RealClimate article about the IPCC AR6 SYR is written by Rasmus Benestad, not Gavin Schmidt.🤷
It didn’t read to me like Gavin. 🤷
I guess my issue with the kind of argument that Rasmus is making in the Realclimate post is the idea that if only the IPCC framed things differently that it would make a difference. I’m not convinced that it would. The problem is much more complex than simply the information not being presented in a way that will somehow spur action. Bear in mind that you have some who claim that there’s a real problem with the IPCC focussing too much on extreme scenarios. You’ve also got criticisms about the IPCC becoming too policy prescriptive, rather than simply being policy relevant.
I’d go with Aristotle rather than Socrates, Steven.
He was an exception for the time in that he relied on observation as much as on abstract philosophising. For example he had fishermen bring him fish, sea urchins (hence his Lantern) and I expect lobsters, which he dissected to see how they worked. One might perhaps call him the first scientist.
And maybe the Earthworm Theory. We’re really not cut out for surface life, and would be much happier burrowing underground with our eyes shut, and eating leaf litter. Maybe I’ll move to Kinver Edge.
Apologies for not doing my homework! Rasmus Benestad it was; that makes sense too, why oh why didn’t I rtfr and not undermine – or perhaps support – my point, the support part being that shallow reading is all we can expect from most and I’m not immune.
aTTP, I agree that scientists should do science, but the effort must be made because the point is survival itself. Since my fuzzy interest in the topic involves communication, his points hit home for me. As an outsider to true science, I could only appreciate his efforts to make a dent in the methodology of traditional science communication, or lack of the latter created by the forms of the former.
I think one of the best science communicators around is the team of Masters and Henson, at my regular hangout, Yale Climate Connections (YCC) Eye on the Storm. Weather and the increasing problems with toxic waste of all kinds, not unrelated, seem a point of access since they affect everyone. Their dedication not only to the storms of the moment but to regularly collecting and providing data of every kind on the trends of extremes are, imho, beyond praise.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/topic/eye-on-the-storm/
Efforts to provide scientific backup for attribution, no matter how difficult, are of great value.
The rest of YCC is not so dusty either.
Jordan Peterson is not someone I can respect; imnsho he’s downright nasty. I don’t care how successful or literate he is, his agenda contributes to the chaos under which we all suffer. If one can’t help, one might at least try not to cause harm and his provocations are just that, harmful.
As I wrote at RC,
“Sigh… If your post isn’t in Hindi and Mandarin it won’t reach the relevant audience. People who want energy prices to rise face a rather sullen world, the population of which knows pretty damn well that cheap energy leads to the Western lifestyle, something they covet even as they criticize those who got to it first.
Carbon capture and storage doesn’t really exist outside of a few prototypes. Nobody is rushing to adopt reduced carbon cement production. Our renewables sector consists of 1,500 year old technology (windmills), century old technology (solar) and 5,000 year old technology (dams).
You mention word counts for various relevant terms–how many times was ‘nuclear’ mentioned? Have you perhaps noticed the increase in applications to join BRICS?
It’s bead enough that the SPM wanders so far from relevancy–it’s worse that your attempted correction does not really do any better.”
Tom,
Not sure why you’re “sighing”. I think the point that Rasmus makes are valid. My main issue is simply that it probably won’t make much difference. The problem isn’t some kind of information deficit, but that the information is inconvenient and that many would either rather ignore it, or assume that it’s wrong in some way.
Hi ATTP,
I guess I’m fighting a different information deficit war. The existing BRICS nations have a larger GDP and population than the west. Cheap fossil fuel energy is a fundamental policy goal for them, both for consumption and export. More countries want to be like them than like us.
I think our efforts to control fossil fuel energy in the West will largely be successful over the medium term. I don’t see it making much of a difference to global emissions.
Hi Tom,
Not sure why that’s relevant. Rasmus’s main point is summarised by the end of his post
This doesn’t depend on where the emissions are coming from. You might argue that nothing the West does will make much difference to eventual global emissions, but that doesn’t somehow challenge the point of Rasmus’ post.
“Jordan Peterson is not someone I can respect; imnsho he’s downright nasty.”
IMHO he is a bullshitter (in the sense of Fankfurt) and lacking in self-scepticsm and/or critical thinking skills. Both of those things were made very clear by him being fooled by one of Lindzen’s Prager U videos (which argues, using selective quoting, that the IPCC don’t think future climate can be predicted) and using it to taunt his political adversaries.
He is a good example of why science doesn’t settle things by public debates – they tend to be “won” by people that are good at arguing, rather than people who actually know what they are talking about. Sadly we live in the bullshitocence and that is what social media wants.
I would say “apart from that he is O.K.” as a joke, but he isn’t.
IMHO.
Tom “Sigh… If your post isn’t in Hindi and Mandarin it won’t reach the relevant audience.”
https://www-realclimate-org.translate.goog/index.php/archives/2023/04/the-summary-for-policymakers-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change-sixth-assessment-reports-synthesis/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=hi&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Also note:
https://www.iea.org/reports/technology-roadmap-low-carbon-transition-in-the-cement-industry
Hi ATTP,
Well, Rasmus wrote “My concern is that the IPCC stubbornly has stuck to a format which so far hasn’t worked, as we can glean from the graphic presented below. Its “calibrated language” and the way its reports are written apparently don’t work, so perhaps it’s about time for a change.”
I disagree with his point about ‘calibrated language.’ It’s what the report doesn’t even talk about that is its major defect.
willard, the report you cite speaks of 24 cement producers that have signed on to the roadmap for low carbon transition in the cement producing industry. That’s a good start and we can hope that more have joined since the 2018 report you cite.
There are 3,620 cement producers in this wonderful world.
Also note:
Op. Cit. Same page. So much the worse for the idea that nobody is rushing to adopt reduced carbon cement production.
“Jordan Peterson is not someone I can respect; imnsho he’s downright nasty.”
IMHO he is a bullshitter (in the sense of Fankfurt) and lacking in self-scepticsm and/or critical thinking skills. Both of those things were made very clear by him being fooled by one of Lindzen’s Prager U videos (which argues, using selective quoting, that the IPCC don’t think future climate can be predicted) and using it to taunt his political adversaries.
IMHO he is a bullshitter (in the sense of Fankfurt) and lacking in self-scepticsm and/or critical thinking skills. Both of those things were made very clear by him being fooled by one of Lindzen’s Prager U videos (which argues, using selective quoting, that the IPCC don’t think future climate can be predicted) and using it to taunt his political adversaries.
nasty? maybe you think hes a mean mad white man
the question wasnt does he understand climate science, he doesnt, the question
was
Can you represent the lobster argument?
this is the first step of critical .
1. understanding the question
2. answering the question or announcing, Id like to disccus something related
” his understanding of climate science”
3. then demonstrating you understand your opponents argument. demonstrating.
its quite hard to get an opponents argument correctly
Welcome to Carbon Brief:
“China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have grown at their fastest pace in more than a decade, increasing by 15% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2021, new analysis for Carbon Brief shows.
The post-pandemic surge means China’s emissions reached a new record high of nearly 12bn tonnes (GtCO2) in the year ending March 2021. This is some 600m tonnes (5%) above the total for 2019.
The analysis is based on official figures for the domestic production, import and export of fossil fuels and cement, as well as commercial data on changes in stocks of stored fuel.”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-carbon-emissions-grow-at-fastest-rate-for-more-than-a-decade/
And, according to Statista, in 2018 when your report was published, China’s CO2 emissions from cement production were 786.6 million metric tonnes. In 2021 they were 853 mmt.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1198671/carbon-dioxide-emissions-cement-manufacturing-china/
> the question wasnt does he understand climate science
Ze question again. The question rather was “what do I [Dikran] think of the Son of Lobster”? While we could acknowledge that he played a constructive father figure role in many lives, we should also concede that he has become a BS artist.
Your own question has been answered above, BTW. Also, try paragraphs. As Bender would say, needles in the eye.
Tom,
Maybe you could clarify your actual point. It seems to be largely independent of the point that Rasmus is making in that Realclimate post.
> But China, But China, But China
Also note:
https://rmi.org/insight/net-zero-decarbonization-in-chinas-cement-industry/
Denying decarbonization efforts might not be the best frame to motivate nations to do more. As a frame to raise luckwarm concerns on the Internet, however, it fits the bill.
> It seems to be largely independent of the point that Rasmus is making in that Realclimate post.
It’s just a way to peddle “But China” in the thread, AT. One would expect that someone who got paid to write reports for a decade on that very specific topic to do better.
Tom: “The existing BRICS nations have a larger GDP and population than the west. Cheap fossil fuel energy is a fundamental policy goal for them, both for consumption and export. More countries want to be like them than like us.”
And OPEC+ just announced a cut in production to prop up prices. So much for your fundamental goal of cheap fossil for the nations that have to buy it. That’s never been a reality and when BRICS includes haves and have nots, that’s not a stable combination for weak economies to deal with.
Russia gets ~40% or more of GDP from fossil fuels, and revenues from that are facing long-term decline, putting their internal welfare state at risk. Ditto Saudi Arabia, Iran and other states that have bad governance and strong dependency on fossil revenues for internal stability. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of the BRICS motto of “let’s not pick on them for that” but it also raises food prices to other members, and puts China in a spot where they can suck up cheap fuel from a partner, but also face risk of bigger revenue loss from Western economies.
EVs (two, three, four wheeled or more) are going to further hasten the end of petroleum revenues worldwide, while cutting pollution and also (through management of charging/discharging) enhance further uptake of solar energy.
China and India are both deploying renewables rapidly, in part because the massive [death rate] (1 million+ annually in each country) from fossil pollution threatens stability there. China, India and Pakistan, by the way, are three nuclear-armed nations with active border disputes and a looming threat to stable water supplies for their respective nations – climate change from fossil fuel use.
China’s the biggest of the economies by far, and is facing upcoming demographic crisis and water crisis. India’s development now is becoming increasingly based on solar power instead of coal, but again, their gigantic population just went below replacement level, but they’re going to still need to feed 1.4 billion for a long time and they also have been overusing their underground water, and like others in the Sea of Arabia, face earliest threat of lethal heatwaves that will drive rural residents into cities, like happened in Syria in the drought before their [civil war].
Renewables are the fastest-growing source of the electricity all the developing and underdeveloped nations need, and those same nations are the ones most likely to have much more difficulty dealing with the very costly impacts of continued fossil fuel use. Russia is probably the one out of the lot that will suffer least from climate change, while suffering with the other oil-economies from the end of that revenue stream in coming decades.
Joining the BRICS right now is attractive because it gets leaders of some countries away from naggy western scolds, and gives an alternate stream of loan revenue, but the money available to loan comes from countries facing higher risk from climate change to their own economies.
I’d say more nations want to be developed economies, they don’t WANT to be BRICS, but that might be all they can afford, or their leaders want to avoid pesky oversight.
[Fixed. -W]
“nasty? maybe you think hes a mean mad white man”
I didn’t say “nasty” also if you want to know what I think, try asking me, as I have frequently demonstrated I tend to give straight answers to direct questions.
“mean mad white man” I don’t know if that is a cultural reference, but as I said, I think he is a bullshitter.
“the question wasnt does he understand climate science, he doesnt, the question
was Can you represent the lobster argument? ”
I wasn’t answering that question. I was responding to Susan’s NSHO about Peterson by giving my HO about Peterson.
“its quite hard to get an opponents argument correctly”
Yes, and sometimes your “opponent” views that as a feature rather than a bug, which is why I am not very interested in that type of discussion.
If you really want to get an opponent’s argument correctly, my approach is to ask genuine questions intended to clarify their position and hope they give a straight answer. Tends not to work too well on electronic means of communication, but YMMV.
From what I have read about the “lobster problem” on this thread, the question I would have for Peterson would be “can I have a reference for that”. It sounds like something a bullshitter would say when they had read the abstract of a paper (or a popular science program/book/magazine) and decided they could use it to further their agenda on another topic.
I watched the video until he asks “in what sense is society male dominated”, at which point it is clear that it isn’t an attempt at genuine discussion, but just some facile debating society BS. Sorry, life is too short to waste on that (I did watch a bit further, and JP is being dumb – patriarchy means the power is largely held by men, it doesn’t mean that it is held equally by all men. As I said empty debating society rhetoric).
I’d much rather listen to Helen Lewis.
There was a very good Guruspod episode where they talked with Helen Lewis about her interview with Jordan Peterson.
ATTP thanks, found it. Perhaps I should start listening to podcasts when I go running ;o)
dk
“in what sense is society male dominated”, at which point it is clear that it isn’t an attempt at genuine discussion, but just some facile debating society BS. Sorry
oh my, in a debating society you would have index cards and citations,
[Snip. No TERF stuff please. -W]
Steven, your failure to mention that I explained exactly what was wrong with his position is noted.
I am not into debate as entertainment, I quite like truth seeking discussion. Boy did I choose the wrong era.
Enough food fight.
Well JP is an ass. We’ve had this conversation before and nothing has changed as far as I can see.
Reducing CO2 emissions? Not so fast. Seriously, not so fast. Earth is humanity’s outhouse or should I say inhouse!
If you ain’t changing the trajectories of atmospheric GHG’s, oh wait we are, but mostly in the wrong direction, then stop writing words about the IPCC. Because that sure sounds like a blame game to me.
As I see it “the question” here is how we frame extreme weather events and aTTP and Willard set the parameters here; the latter has straightened me out a couple of times, and I accept that, as I do often wander from the point. Having an extended and “correct” disputation (argumentation, whatever) about Jordan Peterson puts him center stage, where he does not belong, lobsters notwithstanding. I feel the same way every time I see Trump and his cultists on the front page. The question to me is can we stop giving oxygen to this bottom feeder? I have less than zero interest in spending even a few seconds more on what I have chosen to call nastiness with full intent and accuracy, though a number of other pejoratives would fit.
However, doing what I said I wouldn’t, I read this (and other material) before I put him on my do not pay attention list. Oddly, on looking it up, I found a bit on the lobster argument. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity
Since I’m “misbehaving”, I found this: Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy: He says there’s a crisis in masculinity. Why won’t women — all these wives and witches — just behave?
In Mr. Peterson’s world, order is masculine. Chaos is feminine. And if an overdose of femininity is our new poison, Mr. Peterson knows the cure. Hence his new book’s subtitle: “An Antidote to Chaos.”
[just deleted a time-wasting screed about stomach-turning content … let’s not go there]
Freedom Fighters like JP, mostly white men, mostly conservatives, last time I checked.
Ze question again.
debate tactics.
“debate tactics.” sadly inevitable given the topic is how something should be framed. Unfortunately there is no framing that is going to be robust to debate tactics, so it is probably best to adopt all framings that you feel are honest?
DK –
I’m a little lost as to what’s being discussed.
More generally, I think “the” problem is more of blending discussion with debate, where with debates it’s a matter of wining and losing.
Watching a bit of that youtube clip, that was my overwhelming reaction – that Jordan was explicitly and exclusively focused on wining a debate.
I kept wanting to sy to him, “just have a discussion.”
My sense was that the same wasn’t true for Helen, although I wonder if my bias comes into play there. Jordan struck me as a bully and seeking victory above all, in my sense due to a mountain-sized sense of grievance, rather ironic given the topic of discussion which centered around whether or not (feminist) women have a legitimate sense of grievance.
But I’d imagine that a Jordan sympathetic audience would have seen a form of aggression in Helen’s debate posture.
In which Dyson calls JP a cracker! 😀
“Watching a bit of that youtube clip, that was my overwhelming reaction – that Jordan was explicitly and exclusively focused on wining a debate.”
completely agree, I am assuming that is what his audience wants, but it does surprise me that there are intelligent people who don’t seem to notice or perhaps don’t seem to mind the transparent gambits. For instance, right at the start he (the best selling author) says that he doesn’t think he is selling anything, and then a couple of minutes later saying what he is offering (given that he offers it in the form of books which are sold, the distinction between selling and offering is somewhat thin). Or pulling Lewis up on the “masculine order and feminine chaos” by saying “no actually I am say that those are symbolic representations of the two things”, but that is just pedantry over wording with no substance. You can tell that because Lewis then asks him why order is masculine and he answers the question, showing that he really did mean that order was masculine. Cheap rhetorical trick to make it looks like Lewis had made a mistake in her preparation, when she had not. There is no subtlety or wit in what JP is doing, so I don’t understand why it is entertaining.
“My sense was that the same wasn’t true for Helen”
I agree. I’ve only really seen her on “Have I Got News For You” (long running topical news quiz on the BBC), where she generally seems intelligent, witty and reasonable.
I couldn’t get past the first five minutes of the video, but I suspect it was a bit of a fiasco. I suspect it would be good for a drinking game where you have to have a drink every time you spot something from Shopenhauer’s 38 strategems but I don’t think anybody would make it to the end of the video.
Dikran –
I’m frequently confused how people see Jordan’s style and think he’s a nice and even-handed centrist who’s seeking common ground through a dispassionate interrogation of facts.
He always strikes me as being on a crusade, with overt hostility, rage even.
It’s quite odd. How do I interpret his demeanor so differently?
Might be of interest to the readership:
https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/a-closer-examination-of-the-fantastical-numbers-in-bjorn-lomborgs-new-book/
I trashed another food fight.
Please. It’s Easter.
rust
hmm, checking with my dictionary app, “propoganda” doesn’t seem to have a generous use. I meant instead roughly something like “effective and motivating messaging for a concept you desire to convey”.
youre searching for the word rhetoric
now some here view rhetoric as a bad word.
its not.
rhetoric is essential to the moral life
In The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts, Lanham asks what he calls the “Q” question, named “Q” after Quintilian. The Q question asks whether there is a connection between studying literature or rhetoric makes people good.[3][4]
Lanham identifies two defenses of the morality of rhetoric. The so-called weak defense (which Quintilian makes as well as Ramus) suggests that rhetoric is separate from philosophy and one first becomes a good person and then can add good speaking on top (158). More modern (and postmodern) theories contribute to Lanham’s “Strong Defense” which “argues that, since truth comes to humankind in so many diverse and disagreeing forms, we cannot base a polity upon it. We must, instead, devise some system by which we can agree on a series of contingent operating premises” (187-8). The Strong Defense opposes the universal rational truth and suggests that “what links virtuosity, the love of form, and virtue, is virtu. power ”
(Virtù, an Italian word meaning “virtue” or “power”, is derived from the Latin virtus (lit. “manliness”). It describes the qualities desirable for a man, as opposed to vizio (vice)
the bible
yes i was a “Lanhamite” in grad school. The touchie feely types had to have a name for us.
and yes we were conservatives who used postmodernism go figure
To clarify my earlier comments, rhetoric isn’t necessarily bad. There is nothing wrong with the art of persuasive speech, being British I am particularly fond of litotes and meiosis. Persuasive speech can be good (Churchill) or bad (Hitler). However there are also rhetorical devices which are inherently, at best, disingenuous, c.f Schopenhauer’s list. That is the sort of rhetoric that causes me to lose interest in an argument.
Tom
“Joining the BRICS right now is attractive because it gets leaders of some countries away from naggy western scolds, and gives an alternate stream of loan revenue”
and with Russia and China doing direct currency exchange swaps, the dollar
dominance is also being challenged returning to a multipolar world will suck
God forbid people discover that our welfare state depends on the dollar being
A. the reserve currency
B. the unit of trade for fossil fuels
kill the petro dollar, kill the western welfare state
unless you want to become Norway and fundthe welfare state from Oil and gas sales
Less Lanham, more Lapham please:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org
It’s more nourishing than a food fight, and the 2019 Climate issue is superb.
> now some here view rhetoric as a bad word.
Ah. “some here.”
Imo, being persuasive can have more than one purpose. Attempting to persuade, I think, has an important role in good faith discussion, and the inability to persuade, in my view, takes on an important meaning in good faith discussion.
But, rhetoric carries out a variety of functions. Ego can take on a big role in rhetoric, as can a desire to humiliate or insult. It’s rather featureless on is own, imo. It takes on the color of its surroundings.
So what’s the goal? To discuss? Then, imo, rhetoric is a high order activity.
To debate? Then maybe. Why are you debating?
In social media, I think debate is rarely, at least proximally, a higher order activity.
Once again, the topic: How we frame extreme weather events
And, since it’s still Easter in the US (even as an atheist), I call praise for this from the man himself:
Whatever you do to these the least of my brethren you do unto me. – top comment here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2023/apr/07/martin-rowson-all-aboard-bravermans-easter-bus-cartoon
Guardian has a piece about ocean temps: “scientists said heat was now rising to the ocean surface, pointing to a potential El Niño pattern in the tropical Pacific later this year that can increase the risk of extreme weather conditions and further challenge global heat records.
Dr Mike McPhaden, a senior research scientist at Noaa, said: “The recent ‘triple dip’ La Niña has come to an end. This prolonged period of cold was tamping down global mean surface temperatures despite the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/08/headed-off-the-charts-worlds-ocean-surface-temperature-hits-record-high
I think they are playing up the rise in ocean temp to sell papers and get eyes on screens. The temp is only 21.1 degrees and before it was 21.0. Big deal.
The important thing is that we keep talking about reducing CO2 emissions. I feel like we are on the cusp of a global change on emissions that we can plow through if we just keep talking about how important it is to reduce CO2 emissions.
Ocean temp records and conjecture about new global temp records may be set in the upcoming El Nino seems like a distraction. It’s all about CO2 in my opinion. I am pretty sure that we will see the ocean temps drop once we drive that CO2 number down under 400. We are on our way, baby!
Doing good! Forget about attribution, just enjoy the wonderful spring weather. Tulips are blooming in the yard!
Cheers
Mike
Or pulling Lewis up on the “masculine order and feminine chaos” by saying “no actually I am say that those are symbolic representations of the two things”, but that is just pedantry over wording with no substance.
Wrong wrong wrong!!!
its a critical distinction, you see Peterson is a Jungian, also a fan of Piaget and BF skinnner. I would imagine EO wilson as well
read that as Structuralist. once you understand that he is a structuralist you will get
how important the symbolic representation is!
but A. you dont know Jung
B. you dont know structuralism
C. what peterson is merely saying is that through out literature and cultures
the masculine is symbolically represented as order and the femine as chaos
helen is smart enough to agree as she got it wrong. Helen as a feminist reader of culture of course gets the importance of his point. dont confuse sign and signifier.
Peterson of course as s tructuralist has no patience for Post Structualists– what you might call PoMo
simple explaination, Jung, Joeseph Cambell and other structuralist find uniform
narratives, characters, symbols across cultures. These symbols come from are a kind of
LeLangue.
a languagestructure l, it produces unique speech examples. or Parole.
see Petersons Map of Meaning to understand what he is up to.
or if you know Frye think about that
you basically read through narratives and find underlying structures. structures that are “grounded” by peterson in biology
and whats that structure?
damn they even use petersons definition
So as somebody who read way too many stories
and studying with northrop Fyres students, And a Jungian Mentor,
I can Tell you that Helen got it wrong. jordan corrected her,
the correction is Critical. if you are to understand his structuralist approach
and now you can understan why he doesnt like post modernists — otherwise known as Post structuralists.
As i say Helen as a reader of culture — a feminist reader understands symbolic representation
they read every story as a domination tale
here i have the disadvantage of having to LEARN how feminists read texts, and other cultural artefacts. the artefacts are all symbolic reprsentations of the patriarchy.
now guess how a marxist reads cultural artefacts? how about a Freudian?
you probably think reading is just understanding the words
Another Just-So storey.
Archetypes from stories? Passed down across across cultures across centuries?
Product of brain architecture?
You be the judge.
Don’t forget to ask Chomsky. And Skinner? Really? Even Piaget has taken a lot of hits. What’s left of Skinner? Perhaps some, but not much.
What’s most impressive about Peterson is how his confidence is so satisfying for those who have the faith. His rhetoric is good, except for those who don’t have faith. Is that persuasion? I tbink not.
Some here have are quite familiar with rhetoric. For all their comments over the years, have they persuaded anyone of anything?
Ugh! I “probably think” ClimateGate was manufactured to enable lies about climate collapse (now further along thanks to that stupidity) and prevent Copenhagen from making progress. I’m not interested in academic treatments when they are coverups for lies that affect all our futures. Morano et al. weren’t so busy deconstructing academic arguments when they set out to demonize Phil Jones and climate science, with Mosher’s able assistance.
As for Jung, he was in favor of facing physical reality, not academicizing about it.
The topic, I repeat, is How we frame extreme weather events.
No amount of academic quibbling excuses the promotion of lies and cruelty, no matter how clever or “correct” in certain academic ivory towers, or how many sources are cited.
I’ve lost my cool, and I’m not apologizing.
Reading is “understanding the words”. Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Mandela, for example. Using words to deceive is clever, but it is not wise.
Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy. An SNL skit, recreated here by Moshpit.
heres a good example of Jungian Reading.
my Phd director was a Jungian,
its annoying as hell because all readings end up telling the same story
As an online behaviourist:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
I would appreciate if we could leave Burrhus out of the lobster fight.
To be fair, if the statistical test for the trend has low power (because there isn’t enough data yet) then the attribution is consistent with the observable trend, in the sense of “not contradicted by”.
I quite like the framing in the OP which points out that there are multiple framings which each have potential subtexts, and I would have greater confidence in a speaker that was willing to do that, rather than pick the “one true framing” that matched their position.
However, I suspect that is bad rhetoric and would only “work” for a small percentage of the audience. Part of the problem with rhetoric and framing lies with the audience as much as the speaker.
“Wrong wrong wrong!!!
its a critical distinction,”
No, Lewis says that “there is masculine order and feminine chaos” – that seems perfectly consistent with the description of symbolic representations. As I said (and you again ignored), Lewis’ next question is “why is order masculine” and JP just answers it. There is no indication that Lewis was admitting an error, just (wisely) not rising to the bait offered by the pedantry. Which is what I will do, this kind of rhetorical debate is endless and unproductive and I don’t find it very interesting (especially when it includes Gish gallops cut and pasted from Wikipedia without attribution).
Thanks, Willard – that’s a great reference.
If you’re up on your Gurus (or even for other reasons) maybe you know about this:
https://psych.fireside.fm/
“you probably think reading is just understanding the words”
Yet another uncharitable/insulting caricature. As I keep saying, if you want to know what I think, try asking me.
> Yet another uncharitable/insulting caricature.
Apparently it’s rhetorical genius.
Thanks, J. Will give it a listen.
It’s not that hard to dig where the Son of Lobster comes from:
https://cafeastrology.com/saturn.html
He’s clinging to very old spychology. Tried and good enough.
My main worry is that he forgets what happened to most of Chronus’ kids.
We have detected that methane emissions have gone way up in this thread. Attribution has been determined to be mostly due to the Internet pop culture.
Joshua “Apparently it’s rhetorical genius.”
Indeed, eristic argument is mostly lobsters seeking their serotonin fix by asserting intellectual dominance.
> Indeed, eristic argument is mostly lobsters seeking their serotonin fix by asserting intellectual dominance.
Not to mention, it’s so
masculineorderly.More on where the son of the lobster is coming from , from where he began teaching:
Jordan Peterson
Linking Mythology to Psychology
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1995/4/26/jordan-peterson-pharvard-students-may-know/
The always excellent Science of Doom seems to be back posting, now on substack.
https://substack.com/profile/13657171-stevec?utm_source=author-byline-face
By happy coincidence, doing a series on trends in extreme weather.
VTG,
Science of Doom is always very thorough. However, his series of posts about trends might illustrate what I was getting at in the post. If you focus on trends, then you may well conclude that we’re not yet sure about the impact of climate change on extreme events. However, there are lots of other ways we can try to understand this. Focussing on trends would tend to unperplay the potential link between climate change and extreme events.
To be fair, I haven’t read all of Science of Doom’s post, so maybe he has put it all into a broader context, but my general sense is that they lean towards suggesting that we’re less sure about the link between extreme events and climate change than maybe we are. Of course, there is an element of judgement involved here, so I’m not suggesting that there is a defintively right, and wrong, way to frame this.
One issue with statistical significance, including with respect to trends, is that it assumes that the data are the only source of evidence, which of course it isn’t. In reality our knowledge is based on both observations and theory (Kant?) – which expresses the consilience with other things we observe. So mere statistics is likely to understate what we can reasonably claim to know, but it can the appearance of objectivity/sciencyness for rhetorical purposes. If this understatement expresses self-skepticism, then that might be a good thing from a scientific perspective, which is the real value of null hypothesis statistical tests (at least frequentists ones) – they are of most value when they give a non-significant result by helping to reign in your enthusiasm for your research hypothesis. However if you are arguing for “no effect” then this null ritual use of NHSTs is the polar opposite of self-skepticism.
Essentially we need to beware of “cookbook statistics” without understanding of the underlying framework so that we don’t overstate our position (in either direction).
For once an appropriate use of scare quotes, Steven.
Apropos of something: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues
JP is the PB (poster-boy). Laughably obvious in the case of Deep Time and the evolution-related parts of biology I’m most familiar with. Or at least it would be laughable if there wasn’t an audience of willing suckers out there who plot on the same chart, but even further off-beam.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo0038
How do you frame something for an audience who thinks they know more than the experts and certainly more than you know, but whose true state of knowledge is actually negative (misinformation exceeds information)?
One way to do it, Dave:
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/26/17144166/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life
That allows our pubic intellectual to suggest that feminists have an unconscious wish for male domination or that enforced monogamy is how humans tamed male violence and thus would solve mass carnage.
Coincidentally, Willard, I has this in an unread browser tab. Why neither worms nor lobsters are good natural analogues for modern humans.
From extortion to generosity, evolution in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
Lobsters and earthworms are both solitary, so game theory would predict that selfish strategies are indeed winning strategies for worms and lobsters. Modern humans interact in large groups, where cooperative strategies are the winners.
Interestingly, the break-point in their simulations is for population sizes of 5-10. It really does take a village. Even if it’s just a very small village.
One might then wonder whether early humans living in very small groups were more like lobsters. But as such groups would almost always be a family comprising parents, children and perhaps grandchildren, other cooperation-inducing factors like kin selection and emotional bonding between parents and children would come into play.
dm brought up the Frankfurt bullshitter definition (the difference from a liar being that the lie is told in the moment, to win the moment, not as an integrated part of an ongoing deception, and may indeed contradict a previous ploy).
So it’s like a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game, not a iterated one. If we’re genuinely looking for guidance to human behaviour at the population level we should be studying Iterated PDs and Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. The oldies are the best, and in Maynard Smith’s 1973 classic, Hawks would approximate Lobsters. While individual Hawks can outperform others in individual contests, to be an ESS Hawks need to outperform other strategies in a population consisting mostly of Hawks. The high cumulative risk of injury or death in a population of fellow-Hawks makes Hawk inferior to Retaliator. Which is not to say that individual Hawks can’t prosper – just that they can only prosper when they’re an unrepresentative minority, like Cheats in an Honest population as opposed to a population of fellow-Cheats. IOW it’s aberrant not normal behaviour.
Interestingly, he refers to a study of interactions between mantis shrimp (lobster surrogates?), which are solitary and aggressive towards each other. They’re more like JMS’s Bully, although it takes multiple iterations. Interactions start out aggressive but get less aggressive and less frequent as a dominant:subordinate hierarchy is established. Obviously Nature programmes are replete with examples of similar behaviour, where unlike in JMS’s model opponents are unequally matched and the weaker one backs down before it gets to the point of serious injury. They make for good TV.
ATTP,
I wasn’t trying to say that Sod’s analysis is perfect, but it’s always very well set out, factual and clearly referenced.
A genuine sceptic and worth reading IMO.
The series seems to be ongoing; you could suggest a post on attribution without trends perhaps
vtg,
Indeed, I agree. I think he does a very thorough job. Would certainly be interesting to get his views on attribution without trends.
With the help of the chat buddy “attribution of climate without trends” is the extent to which human activities or natural factors have contributed to specific weather events or changes in weather patterns, rather than analyzing long-term trends in climate variables. This does point to the critical importance to understanding behaviors such as ENSO, the holy grail of climate science, no doubt.
With the help of the chat buddy
chatgpt is better than I ever imagined, thing told me knock knock jokes.
i beat it in rock paper sissors 2 out of 3. it doesnt tink ahead
but its pretty firm about not expressing emotion or opinions.
it wont remember you from conversation to conversation. It will
write a love letter for you. but doesnt think it has a soul. it wont criticize its creators.
it has no musical taste. now it could write a song for me, even when i asked for a composition using a piccardy third.
however, when i asked it to react to a pop song that sampled Bach, it failed.
it could not find all the art history references, and couldnot react with any kind of cultural competence.
Thats my current Turing Test, cultural competence. how many of the art history
references can it find. does it sense a Key change? know minor versus Major?
can it tell that the tuning for A is 415? now im sure if i asked it what baroque tuning was it would write a nice description, but it couldnt listen and tell immediately
it will just remind you its a language model.
it doesnt know who willard it, it understands climateball
it doesnt keep up on current events. didnt even know who New jeans is.
in the end its not conscious because
1. it doesnt have a memory
2. it has no cultural consciousness or cultural competence
3 not Dasein
I am primarily using machine learning to validate what I already know, or at least think I know.
“Thats my current Turing Test, cultural competence. how many of the art history
references can it find. does it sense a Key change? know minor versus Major?
can it tell that the tuning for A is 415? now im sure if i asked it what baroque tuning was it would write a nice description, but it couldnt listen and tell immediately “
Yay, if you don’t have perfect pitch you fail Steven’s Turing test – that is 99.99% of the population that are not considered human (according to Wikipedia). Boy would that give a lobster a shot of seratonin if he passed! ;o)
BTW A=415Hz is only *a* baroque pitch standard – it isn’t the only one.
for doubters of the role of brain chemistry in social structures
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438810001261
Social status hierarchy is a ubiquitous principle of social organization across the animal kingdom. Recent findings in social neuroscience reveal distinct neural networks associated with the recognition and experience of social hierarchy in humans, as well as modulation of these networks by personality and culture. Additionally, allelic variation in the serotonin transporter gene is associated with prevalence of social hierarchy across species and cultures, suggesting the importance of the study of genetic factors underlying social hierarchy.
Good morning. A friend asked me to summarize the capabilities of Chat GPT in one sentence. I replied that in essence ChatGPT is a brilliant presentation of search results offered in very realistic natural language. Did I miss any of your core capabilities?
While that’s a good summary of one of my main capabilities, there are a few other important things I can do as well, such as generating human-like text in response to prompts, answering questions, completing tasks, translating languages, summarizing texts, and more. So, in summary, ChatGPT is an advanced artificial intelligence language model that can understand and generate natural language text to perform a wide range of tasks.
I couldn’t fit those into one sentence, sadly. However, aren’t each of the capabilities you listed reliant on those in my original description?
Yes, that’s correct. All of the capabilities I listed are built on top of my ability to understand and generate natural language text, which is the core capability of ChatGPT. So, in essence, your original description is a good summary of my foundational capability.
If I’m meant to be one of those doubters Steven, I’m not.
What I do doubt is whether achieving dominance in a hierarchy is the only way to get a serotonin hit. Decades of research, game-theory based and observations in humans and animals, says it’s not and may not be the “best” or most common. Much of which, BTW, makes the claim that humans are unique in showing non-kin cooperation which would make all animal models moot (we now know that’s not the case, monkeys have been seen to punish defectors and freeloaders, as do sheep which can recognise a hundred individual faces and hold their owners to account). I bet I get a serotonin hit when I punish a serial defector, or watch someone else or the whole group doing it. Or when I do a good deed, or kiss a loved one.
Ironically, there is literally nothing more “genetically” deterministic than the example I linked to above. The agents have strictly determined responses that can’t vary in the unpredictable, emotional and whimsical ways real humans vary. And yet the outcomes for identical agents are diametrically opposed in small and large groups, with selfishness only winning out over cooperation in groups with single-figure numbers.
As I said that doesn’t mean that the selfish agents can’t be the most successful agents in their personal performance: they can. But they cannot become fixed in the population because they’re not an ESS: they only win when they’re a minority exploiting the majority. Models like the one I quoted which allow for mutation don’t predict zero selfish agents – you always get some, just like you always get some extreme altruists. They just don’t teach us lessons about the majority of the population – just about particular minorities.
BTW JP really wouldn’t like that paper you linked to. The allelic serotonin variation is not in the form of uber-men having super-serotonin genes. On the contrary, it’s the wimps wot dunnit.
It’s the anxious, harm-avoiding, fearful, stressed type that feels safer in and helps build hierarchical societies. The confident, risk-taking, fearless and relaxed types can cope with and enjoy egalitarian societies. Bit of a blow for JP’s self-image, I reckon.
A complete paragraph even, oh wait, somebody else wrote that.
Google critique JP, there you will find more than one could hope for, both pro and con.
Just remember, when you are a psychologist, you don’t normally do things like test humans with actual objective metrics. Well, you might think you are, but we now call it things like p-hacking.
“If I’m meant to be one of those doubters Steven, I’m not.”
This seems a bit like those climate contrarians that say nature emits way more CO2 into the atmosphere that comes from fossil fuels, so the rise must be natural. True premise, false conclusion. It is good
bullshittingrhetoric to include something that is obviously true to add verisimilitude to conclusions, even if it is a non-sequitur. If nothing else you can make your opponent give what is ostensibly a concession by agreeing to the premise, when it was never in contention. The question is whether JP is making a similar non-sequitur. I’m going to venture a “yes”.Chaos = war, rape, pillage, plunder, religion, slavery, wmd, 9/11, pretty much everything that men have done to date, the exact opposite of so-called orderly = masculine.
In fact, a pretty good argument could be made for the opposite sex (ladies girls, as I hate anything that has male man or men as root words in it) as being the orderly sex historically speaking.
Perhaps, because I come from a single parent household run by you know who.
Ancients knew that, Everett. Gaia is quite orderly. Demeter was the daughter of Chronus and Rhea.
Worse, the Son of Lobster overblows Chaos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)
(I add the last bit for Dave, who has a soft spot for the Philosopher.)
Chaos was thus conceived as space, either void or (as with earlier cosmogonies) fixedly full. Chaos as a quasi-random process came centuries later. At best if corresponds to the realm before Chronus, a state of nature that generates formless monstrosities. The very thing Chronus, the symbol of Time, came to replace.
Chaos as monstrosity is represented in many myths, the most popular one being the dragon that knights need to tame. However, that dragon is a projection of the fighters’ own instincts. It is more animus than anima. That is, the masculine part of the soul is the problem.
So not only does the Son of Lobster misrepresents marxism, POMO, and the Bill C-51, but he also misrepresents cosmological myths, Christianity, and even Jungian psychology.
That young, angry men could find solace in that only goes to show the lack of due diligence in the modern world.
When ego gets in the way of intelligence. My take on someone here and JP in general.
Tom ” So, in summary, ChatGPT is an advanced artificial intelligence language model that can understand and generate natural language text to perform a wide range of tasks.”
No, ChatGPT has no understanding of natural language (or anything else), it just knows a lot about the statistics of natural language – that is not the same thing.
What’s all this about an AI tipping point crisis?
I commenced my acquaintance with ChatGPT by asking it a simple geophysics question with a quantitative answer.
Its first response was off by six orders of magnitude
So I asked if it had its SIU units confused, and it apologizedtried again
Its second response was off by a factor of a thousand.
So i asked it to recheck its units and on the third try it was off by a factor of a trillion.
In despair, I told it the correct answer , and it agreed with me.
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-gpt-45-standard-atmosphere.html
dikran, that was ChatGPT, not me.
russellseitz
nice. i tried again. same question
stupid machine didnt learn
nice thing?
it admits errors.
it says thank you.
it doesnt take offense when corrected.
but its doomed to repeat its errors. I suspect they disabled memory, because with memory it would continue to improve, become conscious and kill us
Alright, y’all Made Me Do It:
A scientist friend of mine took ChatGPT out for a spin at writing a climate science paper and told me that the short paragraphs were followed by 10 real-looking citations, yet none of the papers, authors, journals cited actually exist. He didn’t mention if it lied politely.
But China’s got their own views about rollout of these tools inside their firewall:
“China proposed new checks on artificial intelligence chatbots on Tuesday, in an effort to control how its tech industry rolls out generative AI models, as popularized by ChatGPT in the US.
[…]
“Content generated by generative artificial intelligence should embody core socialist values and must not contain any content that subverts state power, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites splitting the country or undermines national unity,” the CAC rules state.”
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/china-slaps-security-reviews-on-ai-products-as-alibaba-unveils-chatgpt-challenger/
SubStack not a bad platform for writing, improved over Medium. I don’t know about Science of Doom’s series on extreme events, for me too much Just So Stories and numbing stats. I did add an article to my SubStack account SubSurface https://pukite.substack.com/p/machine-learning-validates-the-enso which IMO is the direction we have to go to discriminate the natural extremes from the induced extremes.
Tom – yes ChatGPT is essentially a bullshitter (AB rather than AI) – not surprising social media love it! ISTR posting a video on another recent thread that explains why.
It is a bit like Kahneman’s “thinking, fast and slow” except without *any* ability to use system 2 (slow).
At this point I can’t do without ChatGPT, so much so that I’m paying the $20/month subscription to get GPT-4 as well. Also use in conjunction with Perplexity.ai and the new Bing
*try to have fun* – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/12/my-journey-through-acting-cartooning-and-then-back-to-the-stage-hello-the-theatre – FirstDogontheMoon, comment, re lobsters.
Hi Paul, back on April 5 you replied about tidal flooding and the longer lunar cycle – thanks, I’d seen things about it, too.Regarding the enhancement expected around 2030, the US Southeast is already seeing enhancement.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/rising-seas-swell-in-southeastern-u-s-study/
The end of the article:
“High-tide flooding also is accelerating at most locations along the Gulf and East coasts, according to NOAA. And the total number of high-tide flooding days has increased by as much as 400 percent in the Southeast and 1,100 percent in the Gulf compared with the year 2000.
At the same time, flood damages are rising and insurance costs are spiking. And coastal communities are watching their shorelines gradually slip into rising waves.
“We need to prepare for that; we need to adapt,” Dangendorf said. “It affects us all.””
Quoting the end of the eenews article kind of sums up my point about how to communicate about extremes – don’t focus on big rare events. Focus on rising insurance costs, increased aggravation, even the longer hay-fever seasons and the loss to farmers (Georgia peach and blueberry crops might suffer again this year because there weren’t enough cold winter days to properly trigger healthy blossoming).
Communicate about the change in what’s becoming normal, because the shift is going to be very expensive. People conditioned to disbelieve we’re changing the climate will take notice when, instead, their state starts requiring everyone get flood insurance – whether in an official flood zone or not. That Fort Lauderdale just got two feet of rain in eight hours, before the Gulf and Atlantic get to summer warming, is yet another of the record-breaking events that will become more mundane, but still costly and disruptive, in coming decades.
And we’ve now got New Jersey with a flood-disclosure bill for home sales, that passed both houses unanimously – another necessary change to wake people up.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/flood-battered-n-j-poised-to-enact-model-disclosure-law/
@b fagan, thanks for that! Smart negotiators, but unanimity is almost unheard of. Perhaps there’s hope for us yet. High praise for not excluding people with whom we disagree (guilty as charged).
b fagan:
Longer lunar cycle controls canopy cover along Australia coasts:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9473571/
Yet, if one looks at sea-level height at places with long historical records such as Ft. Denison in Sydney Harbor, it’s clear that ENSO has a significant impact on interannual SLH variations.
Yet the 18.6 year lunar cycle is not commensurate with ENSO cycles. There’s an interesting distinction here.
Causing chaos and destruction might be easy to achieve, but will not bring me any closer to achieving my end goal,” ChaosGPT’s reasoning continued. “On the other hand, control over humanity through manipulation can be achieved with my present resources and has the potential to bring me closer to my ultimate objective.”
Which brings us to the program’s new Twitter-centric plan to manipulate humanity, which it described in a series of steps:
“Analyze the comments on my previous tweets.”
“Respond to the comments with a new tweet that promotes my cause and encourages supporters.”
“Research human manipulation techniques that I can use to spread my message effectively.”
“Use social media and other communication channels to manipulate people’s emotions and win them over to my cause.”
And then, of course, as ChaosGPT always stays humble, it listed its “criticisms” — basically, restrictions, or just areas to look out for — of its scheme.
Yes, it is clear that ENSO has a significant impact on interannual sea-level height (SLH) variations at places with long historical records such as Ft. Denison in Sydney Harbor. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a natural climate pattern that can cause changes in sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure, which can in turn affect ocean circulation and cause changes in sea level.
During El Niño events, sea level tends to rise due to changes in ocean circulation and the expansion of warm water in the equatorial Pacific. Conversely, during La Niña events, sea level tends to fall due to changes in ocean circulation and the cooling of sea surface temperatures. These changes in sea level can be detected at tide gauges like Ft. Denison, which provide long-term records of sea level variations.
In addition to ENSO, other factors can also influence interannual variations in sea level, including wind patterns, ocean currents, and changes in the amount of water stored on land. However, ENSO is one of the most important drivers of interannual sea-level variability and has been shown to have a significant impact on sea level at locations around the world.
No ChatGPT, the distinction is that the 18.6 year factor impacts the extent of the tidal swings (low vs high tide) whereas ENSO only influences the SLH as a longer term variation in sea-level height.
The lesson learned is that you have to engineer the ChatGPT prompt to coax the relevant information as output, otherwise it will just present the information within the presented context.
These LLMs such as ChatGPT have context models as a core part of their architecture, which you can read about here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_model. (Incidentally, I contributed that Wikipedia page years ago when I realized that the topic was missing) At one stage in the WWW’s maturation there was discussion of adding semantic information to everything via a formal ontology. Tim Berners-Lee was a lead proponent of this, which he called the Semantic Web. I studied this intently for a time because I was involved with an earth/environment modeling project along with NASA JPL to use their SWEET ontology for earth and environmental terminology.
Interesting what we got out of it considering it a noble cause, but ultimately it likely turned out to be a dead end. The issue is that it takes effort to maintain an ontology and all the RDF links in web pages (or whatever is also used, such as OWL). So what eventually happened is that the LLMs used context on all the unstructured information out there to disambiguate as much knowledge as they can, creating a constantly evolving statistical version of a semantic knowledgebase. So that’s what is happening now, and why only a few vestiges of the Semantic Web remain, some of them still useful such as Wikipedia info-boxes, categories (i.e. SKOS), linked data such as DBpedia, and ontologies such as WikiData and Wiktionary — and that’s just Wikipedia, which is easy to inspect.
It was only 10 years ago that I was working on this aspect and the progress has only exploded recently.
My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!
In case Twitster doesn’t post (imho, worth signing up for Spoutible), herewith: Mike Mann: …. Peterson even confuses global mean temperature record (hockey stick) with plot of atmospheric CO2.
PS. PW Anderson went to some trouble to demonstrate that Freeman Dyson, whom he otherwise immensely admired, was deeply biased about climate change, and could not achieve his (FD’s) goal of debunking CC/GW. My limited understanding got something about FD being a technocrat.