I'm going to paraphrase a demi-god as to what the first of Roger's 10 Rules of Math should be: ~ "It needs to be as simple as possible, but no simplier".
[I have no clue what his 10 will be, but hoping I understand at least 2 or 3]
Unfortunately math can be used to obscure, you have to be a crackerjack with math and statistics just to be able to understand the fraud, therefor most including me are reduced to reading competing takes and trying to decide who is telling the truth.
The temperature hockey stick graph comes to mind. Fortunately on that issue, the main protagonist on one side has all the gravitas of a villain on The Simpsons.
I think I know who you're referring to but any thoughts on Berkeley Earth? I have the impression they produce hockey sticks as well or at least alarming temperature profiles. I'm skeptical of those profiles based on the fact they believe the heat island effect is essentially zero but that's really all I have to go on. What I do believe is that they are sincere in their efforts. I also suspect that if you know what the answer should be (all cynicism aside) that can be very "helpful" in guiding how data is conditioned..
I don’t have the skills to analyze what Berkeley Earth has done for data manipulation.
But I’m sure someone has, like a Tony Heller.
But UHI contamination is massive, some would say it is the largest portion of the increase of the temperature record, so if they say it is nothing then I think they could be safely ignored in anything they produce.
Thanks Pat. I will check Tony out. When I googled him here's the 2nd thing that popped up: "What a truly horrible being is Tony Heller. Stupid and morally repugnant is a terrible combination." An X post from the climate scientist I think you were referring to earlier.
Very true. I've seen that a lot. They will do some analysis, which could have been done succinctly in 2 or 3 pages, instead they do it in 400 pages full of jargon, charts, graphs & formulas galore, so few people have the time to read it and fewer still who can understand it.
Really, it is a logical fallacy called Argument by Gibberish. And the people who might be able to wade through all of that, don't get paid, while the grifters who write it get giant grants from corrupt NGOs.
Once in awhile, when some qualified people do the hard work at zero pay to do a thorough critique, they usually find the same old deception, the vast analysis is all based on bogus assumptions that might be hidden away in one or two lines buried somewhere.
Good example of that is Mark Jacobson's 100% WWS plan for the USA. Based on a free, lossless copper plate electrical grid for the entire area, using a Hydro peak output being 10X larger than his plan claims, which even that being dubious, that wreck his entire long analysis.
My own experience confronting policymakers with unpleasant but uncontested math is that they counter with a statement about the amount of work that has already been invested by them and their staffers in developing and promoting the unsound proposal.
So your analysis fails to account for: 1) the underappreciated intrinsic value of the work done by lawmakers based on their unverified hunches; 2) a stubborn belief in the sunk cost fallacy.
Great job exposing the obscenity of NASA porkbarrel spending. $150B on the ISS which has done very little in science advancement. $196B for the Space Shuttle program that also did very little. Offered a very expensive ride to LEO which had to be complemented by Russian Soyuz launches, which did the same job but much less expensive.
For that much expenditure, we could have permanently manned scientific research stations on the Moon & Mars right now, and likely would have already found extant life on Mars, which almost certainly exists:
We know almost 100% certain that there are living organisms on Mars, right now. The Viking landers themselves virtually proved it, and the excuses NASA came up with to deny that have been debunked. And there is multiple tracks of compelling evidence that confirm that. But NASA, ever since the Viking landers has essentially banned any further direct testing for life on Mars. And even makes sure it doesn't send rovers where there may be extant life. SOMETHING STINKS AT NASA.
Jan Spacek - 25th Annual International Mars Society Convention:
Dr. Gilbert Levin, the only surviving Principal Investigator of the 1976 NASA Viking Lander biology team, presents his startling and overwhelming proof for life on Mars.
And now NASA is pushing an absolutely nutty boondoggle sample return mission from Mars. Pure insanity:
Rethink the Mars Program. It’s time to consider alternatives to sample return, Robert Zubrin:
"....A recent review of the plan of its flagship Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission pegged its cost at $10 billion, a price tag that threatens to preclude funding any other exploration missions to the Red Planet for the next decade and a half. ...
"...For the same $10 billion now projected to be spent on the MSR mission over the next 15 years, we could send 20 missions averaging $500 million each in cost. These could include landers, rovers, orbiters, drillers, highly capable helicopters, and possibly balloons or other more novel exploration vehicles as well. Instead of being limited to one exploration site, these could be targeted to 20 sites and carry a vast array of new instruments provided by hundreds of teams of investigators from around the world.
"...Furthermore, the 0.32 estimate for the probability of MSR mission success only includes technical risk. It ignores programmatic risk, which in the case of the ESA orbiter is extremely high...In short, the MSR program of record is extremely high risk. It could very well not produce any science at all... In contrast, the success of the varied program is virtually guaranteed. With 20 independent missions, each with a success probability of 0.8, the odds are that at least 16 of the 20 will succeed – most probably more, since later missions can take advantage of lessons learned on earlier flights. .."
This is the same NASA that claimed it would cost $100B to develop a new heavy lift rocket in the 1990s and take at least 15yrs. And that's a fully disposable rocket. So Musk develops a heavy lift rocket in 4yrs for $5B that lifts over double as much and get this, is also fully reusable.
His SpaceX Falcon 9 now has launch costs now of $1500/kg vs Big Aerospace @ $11,500 to $64,500/kg to LEO. And the Starship pushing those costs down to $100/kg. Meanwhile our illustrious Congress funnels over $24B to the SLS, which so far has got one rocket off the ground at a cost to taxpayers of $4B per launch. Which is about what the Starship program will cost in total for reusable rocket development in 1/4 of the time. Combined with the Orion capsule has cost over $50B and 17yrs with still not one load carried by the Orion. SpaceX Dragon has carried 11 manned and 9 cargo missions to the ISS already at a cost of $1.7B and 6yrs development time.
Some time ago (around 1975) the aerospace companies changed their culture from "get it done" to "how much money can we extract per contract/task".
This culture is exacerbated by the move from in-house NASA activity to contracting. Yes, they've always had contractors, but the Reagan era movement against gov't, gov't employees and gov't agencies meant that the optics were better for an agency if they reduced the count of actual federal employees and just moved the same activities to contractors where they could, even though it ultimately cost more.
The idea that privatization saves money is a strange delusion. In virtually every case privatization is just a way to give the value of public property to private organizations with zero value for the public.
In any case, this one-two punch of culture change and increased contracting gutted NASA's ability to get anything done. Add the third knock-out punch of the switch from public support to the intelligentsia deciding it was a waste of money and "we should solve the problems on Earth". !@#$ arrogant anti-Vietnam baby boomers, thinking that their moral ascendancy over Vietnam meant that they were infallible in all else including space exploration and nuclear energy.
I worked in the shuttle program with my freshly minted aerospace engineering degree from 1984 to 1987. What a sad, sad place when compared to the actual active years. Not to mention Challenger. The only time I've seen a room full of middle aged engineers all crying...
The real problem is big corporate power figured out it is far cheaper to buy politicians & bureaucrats than to innovate and deliver a good product at a fair price. There is an urgent need to ban all lobbyists, ban lobbying, ban any & all election contributions over $30 and ban PACs. Ban any & all corporate sponsored junkets for politicians or bureaucrats. Ban revolving door type jobs for politicians, either before being elected or after being elected. And term limits and age limits for politicians & bureaucrats. And have a long list of NGOs, like WEF, CFR, TLC, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC, EDF, UCS, FOE, Open Society, many more, that politicians cannot be members off either before running for office or after. They all are a major conflict of interest.
Tucker Carlson: Ep. 58 How did a not very bright thug like Nancy Pelosi get rich in the stock market? Because the system is rigged. Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street, explains.
Nice article - and very clean (see below)! I remember some of the controversy around the Shuttle cost numbers, but didn't remember you as the author - oops!
This post was so clean that I had to really stretch to find a nit to pick :)
"...Last November, I had the privilege to speak at UCLA in the..."
should be:
"...Last November, I had the privilege of speaking at UCLA in the..."
or
"...Last November, I was privileged to speak at UCLA in the..."
The Biden and Trump administrations have provided an excellent pair of bookends demonstrating mathy results for their respective social cost of carbon estimates
Trump, with a private sector like discount rate on the valuation of future warming costs and (to me) rather impressively tossing out all emissions costs not specific to the US got $4
Biden, with a vast RCP8.5 cost overhang in future centuries has achieved a similarly impressive $250
The $250 number is likely more pernicious as it has a high probability of slipping its way into the 'scientific consensus' tent, the world's number one clearinghouse for mathy and truthy statements
Any objective look at reality has to conclude that the SCC is negative, and a large negative number at that.
Unless the view is that humans are a cancer spreading over the planet, a spread that occurred because of fossil fuels. That is the preferred policy view these days.
The real issue is ideology. Add an equation there and another here till the model fit with past data to prove the ideologically driven thesis. Then the model proves to be bogus in terms of predicting power but then most of the damage is done. It is the history of macroeconomics (Paul Romer wrote a devastating critic a few years ago highlighting the issue of modeling and collusion among academics), climate models, epidemiology and many other fields. We are missing proper epistemology.
This comment was very close to what I was thinking. As an Econ undergrad I was pushed to study econometrics. I had a "yes, but ..." moment. The problem to me was the shear number of assumptions and statistical smoothing in the models. Smoothing can make sense. It can also be a thumb on the scale. With those assumptions and adjustments, why use calculus to pretend it is accurate? It is what my Jesuit accounting professor would have called affirmatively misleading detail - not necessarily wrong, but implying a level of precision that does not exist.
Between incomprehensible federal debt numbers, hypnotic COVID death kyrons, meaningful de minumus radiation amounts and mathematical ignorance it's a miracle that anything gets done right. There's always someone pushing the panic button and somehow they dominate the discussion. Thanks Roger for staying the course. I think that's the best lesson from this presentation.
Love this line: “For me, it was an initial lesson in the fact that numbers carry with them political significance, which can be quite removed from the accuracy of those numbers or their connection to the real world.”
Yours is an example of where math does good. As a citizen and taxpayer I want to know the truth. I and I think most responsible adults these day can handle the truth.
I'm going to paraphrase a demi-god as to what the first of Roger's 10 Rules of Math should be: ~ "It needs to be as simple as possible, but no simplier".
[I have no clue what his 10 will be, but hoping I understand at least 2 or 3]
Unfortunately math can be used to obscure, you have to be a crackerjack with math and statistics just to be able to understand the fraud, therefor most including me are reduced to reading competing takes and trying to decide who is telling the truth.
The temperature hockey stick graph comes to mind. Fortunately on that issue, the main protagonist on one side has all the gravitas of a villain on The Simpsons.
So i find it easy as to who i believe there.
I think I know who you're referring to but any thoughts on Berkeley Earth? I have the impression they produce hockey sticks as well or at least alarming temperature profiles. I'm skeptical of those profiles based on the fact they believe the heat island effect is essentially zero but that's really all I have to go on. What I do believe is that they are sincere in their efforts. I also suspect that if you know what the answer should be (all cynicism aside) that can be very "helpful" in guiding how data is conditioned..
I don’t have the skills to analyze what Berkeley Earth has done for data manipulation.
But I’m sure someone has, like a Tony Heller.
But UHI contamination is massive, some would say it is the largest portion of the increase of the temperature record, so if they say it is nothing then I think they could be safely ignored in anything they produce.
Thanks Pat. I will check Tony out. When I googled him here's the 2nd thing that popped up: "What a truly horrible being is Tony Heller. Stupid and morally repugnant is a terrible combination." An X post from the climate scientist I think you were referring to earlier.
That’s funny
I’d call that a ringing endorsement.
Has he ever been called the Donald Trump of climate science? Not Heller.
Very true. I've seen that a lot. They will do some analysis, which could have been done succinctly in 2 or 3 pages, instead they do it in 400 pages full of jargon, charts, graphs & formulas galore, so few people have the time to read it and fewer still who can understand it.
Really, it is a logical fallacy called Argument by Gibberish. And the people who might be able to wade through all of that, don't get paid, while the grifters who write it get giant grants from corrupt NGOs.
Once in awhile, when some qualified people do the hard work at zero pay to do a thorough critique, they usually find the same old deception, the vast analysis is all based on bogus assumptions that might be hidden away in one or two lines buried somewhere.
Good example of that is Mark Jacobson's 100% WWS plan for the USA. Based on a free, lossless copper plate electrical grid for the entire area, using a Hydro peak output being 10X larger than his plan claims, which even that being dubious, that wreck his entire long analysis.
It amazes me how far Jacobson has gotten, that people actually believe he has anything useful to offer.
And they say we are anti-science.
My own experience confronting policymakers with unpleasant but uncontested math is that they counter with a statement about the amount of work that has already been invested by them and their staffers in developing and promoting the unsound proposal.
So your analysis fails to account for: 1) the underappreciated intrinsic value of the work done by lawmakers based on their unverified hunches; 2) a stubborn belief in the sunk cost fallacy.
Great job exposing the obscenity of NASA porkbarrel spending. $150B on the ISS which has done very little in science advancement. $196B for the Space Shuttle program that also did very little. Offered a very expensive ride to LEO which had to be complemented by Russian Soyuz launches, which did the same job but much less expensive.
For that much expenditure, we could have permanently manned scientific research stations on the Moon & Mars right now, and likely would have already found extant life on Mars, which almost certainly exists:
We know almost 100% certain that there are living organisms on Mars, right now. The Viking landers themselves virtually proved it, and the excuses NASA came up with to deny that have been debunked. And there is multiple tracks of compelling evidence that confirm that. But NASA, ever since the Viking landers has essentially banned any further direct testing for life on Mars. And even makes sure it doesn't send rovers where there may be extant life. SOMETHING STINKS AT NASA.
Jan Spacek - 25th Annual International Mars Society Convention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn7wTKIvYAM
How to Search for Life on Mars. First, stop refusing to look. Robert Zubrin, Steven Benner, Jan Špaček:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-to-search-for-life-on-mars
Steven Benner - The Case for Extant Life on Mars - 25th Annual International Mars Society Convention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMgIOVXQ_sI
10 Indicators that Mars Might Harbor Life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqf9JloNrts
Will the SpaceX Starship crew find life on Mars? An exclusive interview with Dr. Gilbert Levin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWMdrNpF_nY
Dr. Gilbert Levin, the only surviving Principal Investigator of the 1976 NASA Viking Lander biology team, presents his startling and overwhelming proof for life on Mars.
And now NASA is pushing an absolutely nutty boondoggle sample return mission from Mars. Pure insanity:
Rethink the Mars Program. It’s time to consider alternatives to sample return, Robert Zubrin:
https://spacenews.com/rethink-the-mars-program/
Robert Zubrin is right about the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission! Here's why! The Angry Astronaut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXK1V67VCec
"....A recent review of the plan of its flagship Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission pegged its cost at $10 billion, a price tag that threatens to preclude funding any other exploration missions to the Red Planet for the next decade and a half. ...
"...For the same $10 billion now projected to be spent on the MSR mission over the next 15 years, we could send 20 missions averaging $500 million each in cost. These could include landers, rovers, orbiters, drillers, highly capable helicopters, and possibly balloons or other more novel exploration vehicles as well. Instead of being limited to one exploration site, these could be targeted to 20 sites and carry a vast array of new instruments provided by hundreds of teams of investigators from around the world.
"...Furthermore, the 0.32 estimate for the probability of MSR mission success only includes technical risk. It ignores programmatic risk, which in the case of the ESA orbiter is extremely high...In short, the MSR program of record is extremely high risk. It could very well not produce any science at all... In contrast, the success of the varied program is virtually guaranteed. With 20 independent missions, each with a success probability of 0.8, the odds are that at least 16 of the 20 will succeed – most probably more, since later missions can take advantage of lessons learned on earlier flights. .."
This is the same NASA that claimed it would cost $100B to develop a new heavy lift rocket in the 1990s and take at least 15yrs. And that's a fully disposable rocket. So Musk develops a heavy lift rocket in 4yrs for $5B that lifts over double as much and get this, is also fully reusable.
His SpaceX Falcon 9 now has launch costs now of $1500/kg vs Big Aerospace @ $11,500 to $64,500/kg to LEO. And the Starship pushing those costs down to $100/kg. Meanwhile our illustrious Congress funnels over $24B to the SLS, which so far has got one rocket off the ground at a cost to taxpayers of $4B per launch. Which is about what the Starship program will cost in total for reusable rocket development in 1/4 of the time. Combined with the Orion capsule has cost over $50B and 17yrs with still not one load carried by the Orion. SpaceX Dragon has carried 11 manned and 9 cargo missions to the ISS already at a cost of $1.7B and 6yrs development time.
Some time ago (around 1975) the aerospace companies changed their culture from "get it done" to "how much money can we extract per contract/task".
This culture is exacerbated by the move from in-house NASA activity to contracting. Yes, they've always had contractors, but the Reagan era movement against gov't, gov't employees and gov't agencies meant that the optics were better for an agency if they reduced the count of actual federal employees and just moved the same activities to contractors where they could, even though it ultimately cost more.
The idea that privatization saves money is a strange delusion. In virtually every case privatization is just a way to give the value of public property to private organizations with zero value for the public.
In any case, this one-two punch of culture change and increased contracting gutted NASA's ability to get anything done. Add the third knock-out punch of the switch from public support to the intelligentsia deciding it was a waste of money and "we should solve the problems on Earth". !@#$ arrogant anti-Vietnam baby boomers, thinking that their moral ascendancy over Vietnam meant that they were infallible in all else including space exploration and nuclear energy.
I worked in the shuttle program with my freshly minted aerospace engineering degree from 1984 to 1987. What a sad, sad place when compared to the actual active years. Not to mention Challenger. The only time I've seen a room full of middle aged engineers all crying...
The real problem is big corporate power figured out it is far cheaper to buy politicians & bureaucrats than to innovate and deliver a good product at a fair price. There is an urgent need to ban all lobbyists, ban lobbying, ban any & all election contributions over $30 and ban PACs. Ban any & all corporate sponsored junkets for politicians or bureaucrats. Ban revolving door type jobs for politicians, either before being elected or after being elected. And term limits and age limits for politicians & bureaucrats. And have a long list of NGOs, like WEF, CFR, TLC, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC, EDF, UCS, FOE, Open Society, many more, that politicians cannot be members off either before running for office or after. They all are a major conflict of interest.
I don't know how you could make it work in practice, but I like the idea.
You'd have to stop the inflated speaking engagements, special book deals, and sweetheart real estate exchanges as well.
Yes, all of that, plus stock purchases:
Tucker Carlson: Ep. 58 How did a not very bright thug like Nancy Pelosi get rich in the stock market? Because the system is rigged. Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street, explains.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1740862759477162304
Roger,
Nice article - and very clean (see below)! I remember some of the controversy around the Shuttle cost numbers, but didn't remember you as the author - oops!
This post was so clean that I had to really stretch to find a nit to pick :)
"...Last November, I had the privilege to speak at UCLA in the..."
should be:
"...Last November, I had the privilege of speaking at UCLA in the..."
or
"...Last November, I was privileged to speak at UCLA in the..."
Excellent, thanks!
The Biden and Trump administrations have provided an excellent pair of bookends demonstrating mathy results for their respective social cost of carbon estimates
Trump, with a private sector like discount rate on the valuation of future warming costs and (to me) rather impressively tossing out all emissions costs not specific to the US got $4
Biden, with a vast RCP8.5 cost overhang in future centuries has achieved a similarly impressive $250
The $250 number is likely more pernicious as it has a high probability of slipping its way into the 'scientific consensus' tent, the world's number one clearinghouse for mathy and truthy statements
Any objective look at reality has to conclude that the SCC is negative, and a large negative number at that.
Unless the view is that humans are a cancer spreading over the planet, a spread that occurred because of fossil fuels. That is the preferred policy view these days.
The real issue is ideology. Add an equation there and another here till the model fit with past data to prove the ideologically driven thesis. Then the model proves to be bogus in terms of predicting power but then most of the damage is done. It is the history of macroeconomics (Paul Romer wrote a devastating critic a few years ago highlighting the issue of modeling and collusion among academics), climate models, epidemiology and many other fields. We are missing proper epistemology.
This comment was very close to what I was thinking. As an Econ undergrad I was pushed to study econometrics. I had a "yes, but ..." moment. The problem to me was the shear number of assumptions and statistical smoothing in the models. Smoothing can make sense. It can also be a thumb on the scale. With those assumptions and adjustments, why use calculus to pretend it is accurate? It is what my Jesuit accounting professor would have called affirmatively misleading detail - not necessarily wrong, but implying a level of precision that does not exist.
Between incomprehensible federal debt numbers, hypnotic COVID death kyrons, meaningful de minumus radiation amounts and mathematical ignorance it's a miracle that anything gets done right. There's always someone pushing the panic button and somehow they dominate the discussion. Thanks Roger for staying the course. I think that's the best lesson from this presentation.
Democrats and their idiot supporters can't add 2 and 2 together so it's pointless even trying.
Let’s keep THB free of the name calling. Thanks!
Love this line: “For me, it was an initial lesson in the fact that numbers carry with them political significance, which can be quite removed from the accuracy of those numbers or their connection to the real world.”
Yours is an example of where math does good. As a citizen and taxpayer I want to know the truth. I and I think most responsible adults these day can handle the truth.