Re: OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008 23:51:23 -0700 (PDT), bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:

On Aug 2, 3:33 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:44:08 -0700, Joerg



<notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 1, 11:05 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:55:10 GMT, James Arthur
<bogusabd...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The only hope for simulation, btw, is if there's net negative
feedback which serves to constrain the accumulation of errors.
Like the resistor across an integrator's cap.
Egad! If climate has serious nfb, there's no warming crisis. If it
doesn't, the models are useless. In either case, AGW panic is bogus.
It is bogus

That's John Larkin's ill-informed opinion, and apparenty your own -
equally ill-informed - opinion.

Let's not go there again. IMHO there is no iron-clad proof that there is
global warming and it is caused by humans.

AGW is more of a psychological Rorschach test than it is any sort of
physical science.

So you claim. Since you don't seem to know much about the physical
science involved, this is roughly equivalent to quoting your local
astrologer on teh subject.

Better than Rorschach maybe. Cheerful, optimistic
people either discount it or figure we'll adjust, or even that it's a
good thing on balance. Bummed-out neurotics and pessimists and
activists look at change with eager horror, and the politicians (and a
lot of the researchers) live on that fear.

Cheerful optimistic ostrichs bury their heads in attractive golden-
coloured sand.

Burn-out neurotic pessimists are actually more realistic that their
more well-adjusted contemporaries - they tend to assess the chance of
something going wrong in "toy" situations pretty exactly, while
"normal" subjects are distinctly optimistic.

but the real problem is that lots of politicos have bought it.

It's in their interest to buy it. Great opportunities for votes,
taxation, control.

Too many wusses in the world. That's an evolutionary artifact of
evolving in a dangerous world and living in a less dangerous world: it
leaves a lot more fear than we really need now. Intelligence is
useless when fed observations filtered by fear.

Filtering by feckless optimism doesn't seem to be any better. Why not
try and find out a bit more about the subject before giving us the
benefit of your wisdom, certified as it may be by commercial success
in an area that you do know something about?

My business involves making quantitative predictions of
never-before-done product performance, taking orders for firm
deliveries based on that performance, and making it work, usually the
first time. That involves very carefully calibrated risk-taking and
brutal realism. We are seldom very late, and have never screwed up.

We are just finishing this up:

http://www.highlandtechnology.com/DSS/T346DS.html

It turned out to just the right amount on-the-edge. The FPGA just
meets routing and timing with the features and performance we
promised. Thermally, it's pushed just about as far as is safe. The
very first assembly of the very first 8-layer PCB works exactly as
planned, with one 0603 resistor kluged across an SMB connector to
provide a pulldown that we should have thought about before. The
firmware (my job) just fits into the 4M eprom *if* we compress the
Xilinx config stream. Prefectly calibrated recklessness.

That's what electronic design is all about, carefully projecting
performance and making it happen. That has little room for pessimism
(under-promise performance or overstate delivery time and nobody will
buy) or for uninformed optimism (if it doesn't work, they won't pay
for it.)

But climate models are untestable, so anybody can claim expertise
there, and even get paid for the untestable results. It must take a
special kind of person to be satisfied doing that.

John


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