Part 2, Conlawprof and Climate Change

From: Professor BBB:

I don’t want to belabor this. Perhaps “expected” would have been a better choice than “predicted,” albeit neither term appears in the IPCC report. The point is that the 2017 observations exceeded the trend. The trend points to what might be predicted.

More important, the macro-effects are much, much more important than parsing micro-precision.

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From: Seth

No one wants to belabor anything. But only you can decide what you reply to, and how you do so (“Your note reveals a common misunderstanding of the predictive models ....”).

You originally wrote “predicted”—even to the extent of interjecting that word into a quotation from a report. Now you are saying “exceeded the trend.” But the report did not say that either ... it merely said one dataset (2017) exceeded a prior 30-year “average.” I see nothing about “trend.” In a climate stable environment, as the alternative or null hypothesis, there was a 50% likelihood that the 2017 dataset would exceed the prior 30-year average. So that fact is hardly all that interesting. Right?

I think my initial comment about climate change models lacking robustness—including, e.g., the ability to reasonably accurately predict future observations—stands unrebutted. This is particularly true in light of Professor BBB’s original observation: “The models and reports also tend to under predict global temperatures.” Models that systematically over predict the amount of observed global warming (if any) & models that systematically under predict the amount of observed global warming (if any)—are equally models that don’t work well. Indeed, when observed phenomena contradict what a proposed model predicts, the standard practice is to say the model and/or its predictions have been falsified. See Popper. We would not govern our private affairs by models that we know don’t work—it seems (to me at least) to govern our public affairs on such a basis is wrong.

Seth

Seth Barrett Tillman, Part 2, Conlawprof and Climate Change, New Reform Club (Aug. 22, 2019, 8:35 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2019/08/part-2-conlawprof-and-climate-change.html>. 

Here is part 3: Seth Barrett Tillman, Part 3, Conlawprof and Climate Change, New Reform Club (Aug. 23, 2019, 7:05 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2019/08/part-3-conlawprof-and-climate-change.html>. 

Here is part 1: Seth Barrett Tillman, Conlawprof and Climate Change, New Reform Club (Aug. 21, 2019, 12:44 PM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2019/08/conlawprof-and-climate-change.html>.