Saturday, January 27, 2007

Thumb sucking....

In the noble tradition of ear twirling while we wait, Eli wonders what will leak out of the closed room where the Technical Summaries and Summary for Policymakers are being drafted and reconciled with the Working Group Reports for the Fourth Assessment Report. Already alarms are being raised in alarmed circles about this process, but the remarkable thing is that for the Third Assessment Report, very little leaked. However we do recall that the IPCC did publish tables of changes that were made

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some alarmism is indeed amusing to behold.

Whilst twirling our collective ears (hey, primates can do it too, it's just sort of pointless), we can wonder how long it will take this to get translated into Macropielkean. Eyeballing the North Atlantic, the portion north of 40 degrees plus the chunk of the Gulf Stream below 40 degrees together look to be at least 40% of the whole. If the same thing holds for other basins, implications for the error bars on the Willis et al results start to look considerable.

Anonymous said...

While the armchair alarmists ring their (false) alarms about the "Evils of the IPCC", the Bushies are trying to cut off the bunny's ears before it even has a chance to get out of the burrow:

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1999968,00.html

Archimedes had nothing on the Bushies. I'm sure these people could even "shock and awe" God if they put Rumsfeld on it for a couple hours.

EliRabett said...

The position of the Bust administration is exactly why Eli thinks the drafting process will leak like a sieve. The Busties leaks will provoke counterleaks until we know it all. But then again, Eli does.

Anonymous said...

If you know it all, then why don't you tell the rest of us what happens to sea level over the next 50 years?

And why is the fine structure constant = 1/137.03599 ? (more or less)

And why is the "theory of everything" (string theory) more complicated than the "everything" it describes?

EliRabett said...

Dear Anonymouse, Allow me the privilege of providing a simple answer at no charge to one of your questions:

3. Because it is not even wrong.

Anonymous said...

There is an interesting (and potentially useful) relationship between numbers 3, 2, and 1.

If the value of the fine structure constant differed by little more than about 4% from the value it has, there would be no "string theory" and we would not have to worry about sea level rise due to global warming (or anything else, for that matter) because there would be no humans.

The upshot is that I think we need to focus in on changing the fine structure constant to a value that makes carbon atoms fly apart and therby obviates the need to address global warming (and to figure out spagh... I mean string -- theory).

Any suggestions on how we might do that, Eli, oh Haracle?

EliRabett said...

At this very momment the Rabett Labs Fundamental Constants Adjustment Committee is working on the problem. The grad student bunnies figure that either they can do a better job, or no one will know what happened. Indeed this is a problem which has long concerned those of us who spend our days twitching our noses.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for that link to Not Even Wrong Eli.

I didn't understand much of what was said but found it intersting that Lubos is as obnoxious in the Physics arena as he is in Climate Change

Anonymous said...

I didn't understand much of what was said"

Join the club.

My guess is that the string theorists commenting there don't understand what they are saying, either -- or they would not be wasting their time on a theory thatc (after 20 odd years of work by some of the world's highest IQ's) has yet to pass a single test linking it to reality.

The primary difference is that they don't know that they don't understand and you do.

Notice I did not say the "World's smartest people". Smart people don't continue down dead ends even after they have reached the end of the dead end. Like MC Escher's ant, they seem to be trapped on a Moebius loop of their own making.

EliRabett said...

Physicalists are not noted for social skills. Being able to cut your losses is a social skill