New Orleans facing castrophic flooding - again.

ragan one thing you said kinda jumps out at me. . You said that this isn’t political but it’s objective reality. That’s a very tough thing to talk about because very few things in science are objective. Let me kinda walk through what I mean.

First, there is no such thing as bad data. Anyone that says the phrase bad data is speaking loosely or incorrectly. There’s only bad analysis. Even if your tools are out of calibration the data reflects that. The data just is, it’s just information.

So no one is able to gather information and say objectively that the climate is warming due to anthropogenic effects. Not like you could say, there were two apples on my desk and now there is one because I ate one.

What we can do is take data and perform analysis. But now, we have to talk about primary, tertiary data and so on. If I take a measurement with a thermometer that’s primary data. If I compile measurements taken all over and post an average, that’s secondary data. Or, if I take that thermometer temperature and say, I know that temperature is a good analog to something else, like, maybe humidity. Now there is an implicit layer of analysis, so we have a secondary layer of data that’s metadata.

When you analyze a photo, you take primary data (color of a pixel) and add an analysis layer (1= ice 0= no ice). Then you take that metadata and do something else with it. And tertiary, and that gets fed into another, until at the end on this big pile of meta meta meta analysis you wind up with an equation that says CO2 up, temperature up, and oh by the way it’s unstable.

There’s nothing wrong with that at all. There’s no lie or conspiracy. But here’s one thing that gets tough.

Every layer of analysis has an error bar. Even the primary measurement has an error bar. And further, every layer of analysis has a sensitivity to error. For example, if my primary error is +/-100 degrees, my humidity sensitivity to error is HUGE even if the accuracy of the data is dead nuts on (not the precision).

What gets really murky is how those sensitivity numbers add up - how sensitive is the final model to assumption number 3 in the chain of 4 assumptions? If we take the two extremes of assumption 3s range, do we get wildly divergent outcomes? The truth is this kind of analysis is difficult, costly, and...mostly uninteresting. Maybe impossible. But without it you really don’t know if you final result is useful at all. A lot of the data were using is stochastic, so even if we have rock solid analysis and models our sensitivity to initial measurement error maybe all over the place. In other words, climate is really freakin complicated. That should make us less confident in simple conclusions, not more.

Metanalysis of scientific studies really shows that it’s not conspiracies that foul everything up but that humans just have bias and bias strongly affects outcome. Especially when you have multiple layers of analysis separating from the primary data, which probably has the least sensitivity to bias.

For fun, read this. It’s pretty amazing.
slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/

For that reason, I’m reasonably skeptical of AGW claims. And sometimes I wonder if the proposed medicine is worse than the disease.

Man this is why I LOVE not being biased politically. I can actually sit back and look at both sides and understand why something like the climate is even political.

One side is saying we need to stop burning fossil fuels. The other is saying we need to keep burning them and actually burn more. The fun part is doing research into who each of these sides of people are tied to. It's sad.

All that said. We have a scenario where a TS is steaming for a place that was turned into hell 14 years ago. People are worried about the well being of those residents because they saw what Katrina did. There's even more worry from people because the Mississippi river is twice what it should be and will crest at 19' around the time the thing pulls in. Seems like the thread would've been created to bring awareness to people who havn't seen this yet and to also prompt people to form a mass consciousness of people to pray in whatever way they do that. Hopefully that's what people will do before and hopefully people will contribute after if they can and if there is a need. That's why I'd make this post at least.

ragan one thing you said kinda jumps out at me. . You said that this isn’t political but it’s objective reality. That’s a very tough thing to talk about because very few things in science are objective. Let me kinda walk through what I mean. 

What I meant was that, unlike most things political, in this case there *exists* an objective reality. Whether we can get at it and what we do to try involves all the issues you and others point out.

But with most things political, there isn’t even an underlying objective reality to begin with. It’s almost purely identity and loyalty and ideological lenses and things. With climate, those things come into play every step of the way but it’s fundamentally different to me because there is an actual answer to a given query. We may not be able to get it at a given moment but it does exist. That’s the “objective” part I meant to be talking about.