When I moved from the UK to take up my university post, I moved to a hot country. Shortly after I arrived, and with typical British understatement, I said to a colleague, “It’s Hot”.
He smiled at me and said “Here, we have 2 seasons. We have Summer and we have Hell”.
So it’s quite amusing to hear media people in the UK talk about “extreme” heat in the UK. Even more amusing is the interview which can be seen here. It’s a clip of a GB News interview. This aptly demonstrates the intellectual capability of the climate alarmists.
The micro-brainlet they interviewed claimed that in just 2 days of ‘hot’ weather 1,700 people died in the UK because of it. That’s right. Seventeen hundred people died in just 2 days because of climate change. Naturally he was challenged, and you can watch the whole train wreck of an interview for yourselves, but here’s the transcript of an excerpt :
Interviewer : How did climate kill these people?
Climate Dick : OK, so there’s a variety of different factors, right. In this case it was because of the extreme heat. When the temperature gets hot enough . . . you literally boil in your own sweat
At this point, one of the interviewers has to cover her face because she’s giggling too much
This confusion is likely to have arisen from the practice during Mediaeval times when defenders of a castle had run out of oil - they boiled their own sweat to throw on the attackers1.
I don’t know what’s worse, boiling in your own sweat2 or having to listen to this moron.
Slightly more seriously, but only slightly, is this article from Australia
It’s almost like they don’t really want to be taken seriously.
The Australian article does attempt to be “scientific” and it provides some helpful Pointy-Head Picture of Petrifying Prediction
So, basically, some sciency types generated a model which linked “emissions” with temperature and generated a scary graph. They would probably have been more believable if they’d just pulled some figures out of their sweaty arses.
There is, however, just a teensy-weensy problem with the various climate models.
They’re shit.
Sorry to be so technical here. As predictors of future temperature they just don’t work too well. This is because the many complicated and interacting factors which go into determining “the” climate3 are just not understood well-enough.
Even if they did “work” and were able to more accurately predict future warming trends does this mean they are correct?
Not at all. It means that this particular model, with this particular set of parameters, is able to reproduce numbers that match observation. There is no guarantee of uniqueness in any of this. Another model, including a different mix of factors and parameter values may well be able to predict future data just as well.
There’s a tendency to “believe” the models you create. You do all of this work, put in all of the factors you think are relevant, generate all of the coupled stochastic differential equations, make the various necessary approximations and statistical assumptions, input what you think are sensible parameter values, and press “go” on your computer.
It doesn’t work. So what do you do? You fiddle with the parameters. If I choose 4 to be my coefficient of bloody stupid I get better agreement with the data. You end up thinking that the parameter value is actually closer to 4 than your original input, rather than thinking “my model is buggered up to all hell”.
We saw this kind of thing with the covid “modelling” where these complex epidemiological models were created and then the various parameters adjusted to get a better fit - and then this was taken to be the “correct” model.
For example, you might have generated your covid model with an initial guess for an IFR of 2% and found it was out. You could then adjust the value of this - maybe choosing an IFR of 0.7% - and find that you now have much better agreement. Does this mean that the actual value for the IFR is 0.7% ? Not at all - and I’m sure you can see why.
Having said all that, modelling is very important. It’s a really useful tool. But, but, but . . .
. . . it must be used with extreme caution
Any model you generate, purporting to describe reality, must be tested to hell and back. And even then you should maintain a degree of scepticism.
I’ve never met Prof Clauser, although I’ve met the other 2 guys who shared the Nobel Prize with him, but I know him from his work - and he is, as you might expect, pretty damned good4 and very, very smart. If he says the climate models have missed out an important mechanism or two, or very poorly understood these mechanisms, (water vapour, clouds etc) then I doubt very much whether he’s talking out of his arse - sweaty or otherwise.
But think about this - the politicians and the various climate goons are telling us we need to drastically impoverish ourselves and radically change everything because the models tell us carbon dioxide, generated by human processes, are causing a catastrophic rise in temperature.
Yes - the MODELS tell us this.
But they don’t work very well.
Don’t worry your superfluous plebian head, buttercup, we know it’s carbon dioxide wot az dun it.
And, we’re going to stop doing stuff that generates carbon dioxide in the UK which will have all of a percentage point impact on temperature - if there’s a significant association between carbon dioxide and temperature at all, that is - which we know there is because the models told us there is.
But the models don’t work very well.
We don’t care. Just behave yourself and do what we tell you to do.
I’m echoing some of the same points made by the bad cat in his recent magnificent article - it really is a masterpiece in my view, and lays out so many of the strands of how we’ve managed to get to this point of climate totalitarianism.
The point made, and it’s one that really needs repeating very strongly again and again and again, is that there is no sense in which the climate cabal can be said to be operating on the basis of “settled science” - not that such a thing ever really exists anyway.
We’re Building Back Battier on the the basis of some very flawed models and very incomplete understandings.
I don’t claim to understand the climate any better, either - but I can smell bullshit from a mile off.
It isn’t the climate that’s dooming us, it’s the current totalitarian idiocracy that we’re living under at the moment.
Just in case you’re wondering, and I sincerely hope you’re not, this never happened.
Which I suppose is marginally more preferable than boiling in someone else’s sweat.
And what the hell is THE climate anyway? We have many different climate regions, but there is no one thing called “the” climate.
Here’s me doing my typical British understatement thing again
The fing wot shots me...well, there are many actually, but anyway...is the claim that we must trust the settled science.
The essence of science is scepticism.The scientific method, the very fundamental essence of science, requires that we challenge the accepted truth on order to discover the actual truth. This is how progress is made.
A classic example of this was Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovering that stomach ulcers are caused by the heliobacter bacterium. Decades of common knowledge (and vast profits to big pharma) dictated that stomach ulcers were caused by stress. Those two men struggled against overwhelming odds to prove that common knowledge was wrong.
Anybody who says we should accept the settled science around climate boiling, or anything else, is a Thunbergian imbecile. That is not how science is done, and we must mock these fucking morons wherever they are found.
I am opposed to violence as an instrument of persuasion, but if the boiling in your own sweat climate alarmist was boiled in oil I would not object. On Fox News this morning a student Republican stated that her main concern was Climate Change. Others were more concerned about the rising cost of living. No one pointed out that the futile attempt to control the former is causing the latter. Well, that and open borders. Electing the demented has consequences.