Seth's Blog

Q: How many climate scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. No need to change it. Because it’s been changed in the past, they say, it will be changed in the future.

A tiny fraction of climate scientists publish papers showing how their model can fit past data — say, global temperatures from 1600 to now. The authors of these papers claim that this sort of thing shows their model can predict accurately. In fact, it means roughly nothing — perhaps the model was flexible enough to fit any plausible past data.

Outsiders take fitting past data seriously, but what do they know? However, when a graduate student in atmospheric science takes fitting past data seriously (“it is perfectly reasonable to treat reproductions of the past climate as [successful] predictions”), the whole field has a problem.

A few weeks ago I pointed out the lack of a good reason to believe the scary predictions of climate models. Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and a million other public figures say we should believe what the models predict about global temperature ten years from now. Yet, as far as I know, the models have never made accurate and surprising predictions of global temperature. They are claimed to do what they have never been shown to do. In contrast to the absence of accurate predictions of global temperature is the presence of wrong predictions.

The lack of persuasive predictions is clearest when experts who believe climate models fail to supply them. This is why I linked to a warmist web page with a wealth of “supporting” information. Surely its creator had studied the issue deeply. This is why I noted that the Science Editor of The Independent, a major English newspaper, failed to supply such evidence. Surely he had read a lot about the issue.

And this is why I note that a graduate student in atmospheric science has failed to supply such evidence. On my Psychology Today blog I reposted one of my earlier posts about this.  The graduate student said I was “misinformed about the nature of climate models” and that he “could go on for pages” about why. But he too failed to supply an example of an accurate surprising global-temperature prediction. (For an inaccurate prediction of a 1986 model, see here.)

From the new BBC series Human Planet, which I like even more than Planet Earth, I learned that Greenlanders store birds they catch in summer — during a migration over the island — in a sealskin bag. Stuff 300-500 little auk birds into the bag, press all air out, sew up the opening, cover with heavy rocks, and wait three months.

The fermented birds are called kiviaq.  Kiviaq is valued highly, served on special occasions such as weddings. The aroma should “sting the nostrils. . . The flavor should resemble extremely intense Gorganzola cheese.”

The kiviaq segment ends with this voiceover:

And it’s nutritious, full of vitamins and minerals that will sustain people over the winter months ahead.

Reflecting the mainstream view that microbes (made abundant by fermentation) don’t matter.

Apparently not:

I was a very naughty patient and, after taking Atacand for 135/75 blood pressure (benign essential hypertension was the description) for a number of years on my doctor’s prescription, decided to do a little experiment. That is, I cut back on it gradually, monitoring my BP every day. No change.

I eventually got to no Atacand at all and have been there for the past four years, during which time the BP has remained the same as when taking the drug. Now, whether the BP is going to kill me is perhaps a separate question (I seem to be in excellent health at 65) but the Atacand doesn’t appear to have made much difference at all — except for the $600/year it cost me, even after insurance had picked up on some of the expense.

I began to grasp how helpful self-experimentation could be when I discovered that tetracycline, an antibiotic that my dermatologist had prescribed, did not reduce my acne. When I told my dermatologist about the research that revealed this, he said, “Why did you do that?”

Had this person’s doctor told him that Atacand might not work? Clearly not. Did the doctor even know that Atacand might not work? Apparently not, since there was no doctor-guided attempt to find out. Perhaps the doctor who prescribed Atacand would defend himself by saying, lamely, that all he knew is what the drug company told him. I wonder what the drug company knew.

How much money could be saved by stopping the prescription of drugs that turn out not to work? Should all drugs come with a label that says the fraction of patients for whom this drug doesn’t work? It is a warning that is truly needed.

Thanks to Rajiv Mehta.

At Berkeley, I found that the more I let my students decide for themselves what to learn, the more they learned. What they chose to learn was more valuable to them than what I might have taught. A student with severe fear of public speaking decided to give a talk to a high-school class. Every step was a struggle, but she did it. “I have learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.

I told a friend of mine, a German professor of journalism named Lorenz Lorenz-Mayer, about this. He told me about some independent students in his department:

They were students in the class of 2007 in our online-journalism program at Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. [They had just graduated from the German equivalent of high school.]

During their very first term as freshmen, instead of focusing on new-media projects as we expected, they started producing a kind of city magazine for students, called Darmspiegel. The name is a pun on the unsavory name of the city we work in  (Darmstadt = Bowel City), and Germany’s most important newsmagazine, Der Spiegel. Darmspiegel literally means colonoscope. Another idea we couldn’t talk them out of.

Because they couldn’t afford to print their magazine they started with a pdf version. After some experience with it, they started a marketing department, acquired advertising, and successfully printed something like four more issues.

http://shop.darmspiegel.de/product.php?id_product=13

After having done this for a year and learned their lessons, they chose their next project, which was to be . . . a book. This was when the group, something like 60% of the 40 students in the class, together with some two dozen friends from other departments, asked us to make them media partners for a term project, voicing the unforgettable threat: “You can of course coerce us to do some other project, but you should reckon with the possibility that our heart will not be completely in it. If, on the other hand, we do this thing together…”

So two of our professors negotiated a compromise: It would have to be a book on Darmstadt. The outcome:

http://nachtsindarmstadt.de/

“nachts in darmstadt” turned out to be wonderful book, full of moving stories, beautiful pictures, even an oil painting on the night the bombs fell on the city at the end of WW II was painted, dedicated to become one of the illustrations. A delegation went to far  north of Norway to see the midsummer sun in Trondheim, a partner city of Darmstadt. They used a Wiki to coordinate their efforts and a weblog to promote the ongoing project:

http://nachtsindarmstadt.de/2009/

They tried several old and new forms of marketing (like nightly “guerrilla gardening”, illegally planting flowers in Darmstadt city). The book was published and — predictably — soon sold out.

Some minor projects followed, then the class had to do their obligatory 6 months of internship in different media companies. After returning, some of them majored in Public Relations, others continued Journalism, never quite reaching the prior level of productivity, as a team. Three of the group have burnt the midnight oil again (while still finishing their studies) and together with friends started a bookazine publishing house:

http://herznote.com/en/team/

They’ve already published one multi-lingual magazine issue, on fashion topics (each issue is going to have a different topic), collecting and curating texts and pictures from fashion blogs:

http://circus-bookazine.com/en

A second issue on travel is ready for print, they have started taking preorders.

Wow! They did so much. I get the same impression I got with my students: Something powerful inside of them had been freed.