FARMERS ALMANAC More Reliable Than Warming Climate Models

THANKS to my friend Terry Donze for sending this...

See linked Comments, including this prescient quote from President Eisenhower's Farewell Address:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Dwight David Eisenhower (1961)


http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/022114-690857-farmers-almanac-more-accurate-than-climate-models.htm#disqus_thread

 

Bad Science: It turns out that a 200-year-old publication for farmers beats climate-change scientists in predicting this year's harsh winter as the lowly caterpillar beats supercomputers that can't even predict the past.

Last fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) predicted above-normal temperatures from November through January across much of the continental U.S. The Farmers' Almanac, first published in 1818, predicted a bitterly cold, snowy winter.

The Maine-based Farmers' Almanac's still-secret methodology includes variables such as planetary positions, sunspots, lunar cycles and tidal action. It claims an 80% accuracy rate, surely better than those who obsess over fossil fuels and CO2.

The winter has stayed cold in 2014, and snowfall and snow cover are way above average. USA Today reported on Feb. 14 that there was snow on the ground in part of every state except Florida. That includes Hawaii.

"Sometimes trying to figure out why something happened is as hard as making the forecast of what will happen," CPC Acting Director Mike Halpert said in a Feb. 14 interview. Such uncertainty is what we are supposed to be basing our industrial and economic policy on.

As Bloomberg notes, the CPC underestimated the "mammoth December cold wave, which brought snow to Dallas and chilled partiers in Times Square on New Year's Eve." The Almanac didn't, though Caleb Weatherbee, its prognosticator, apologized for being a few days off on two of the season's biggest storms.

The CPC seems to have completely missed the "polar vortex" that swept down and caused every state except Florida to experience snowfall and brought about 4,406 record low temperatures across the U.S. in January, along with 1,073 record snowfalls.

As John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has noted, global temperatures collected in five official databases confirm that there's been no statistically significant global warming for the past 17 years — contradicting the predictions made by 73 computer models cited in the United Nations' latest (wrong) global warming report.

In recent years we've seen predictions of snowless winters, an ice-free Arctic, and island nations disappearing under the rising seas. We've also seen climate expeditions stick in ice that wasn't supposed to be there and polar bear populations rising.

Maybe Al Gore should check the Farmers' Almanac.

BLOGS on SCIENCE, REALITY and POLITICS

Some of Craig's Blog Posts on Science,  Reality and Politics:

 

THE FALLACY OF TRUTH 


SCIENCE = INDUCTION + DEDUCTION 


UPDATED AGW SKEPTIC'S CASE 


SUBORDINATE ACTS


SOLAR JOBS


CRITIQUE OF RAND'S "NATURE OF GOVERNMENT"


 

MY FAVORITE BLOG POSTS

by James Craig Green

 

I've been blogging about two years now.

 

Most of the following - my favorites - are about the government BEAST destroying America to the most resounding applause and PUBLIC praise:


Adam Smith's Dismal Science (Mar 2011):
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2011/03/adam-smiths-dismal-science.html
(MALTHUS' BLUNDER, Great Myths of the Great Depression and the illogic of a

century of overblown government regulation, while blaming markets)


Science = Deduction + Induction (May 2011):
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2011/05/science-induction-deduction.html
(Why SCIENCE can never be settled... please stay with it; you'll be rewarded)


Private Property, Public Plunder (May 2011)
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2013/04/private-property-public-plunder.html
(Private Property PRODUCES ALL the wealth that Government consumes and wastes)

 

 

The Problem With Democracy (Jun 2011):
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2011/06/democratic-family.html
(VOTERS in a Democracy overwhelm producers, like in the ROMAN EMPIRE and today's Post-Peaked WELFARE STATES)

DON KIRKLAND on The Gap Between Rich and Poor (Mar 2012):
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2012/03/gap-between-rich-and-poor-in-america.html  (Excellent Summary of GOVERNMENT-GONE-WILD by my Best Friend)

Junkie Nation (Dec 2012):
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2012/12/junkie-nation.html
(More on the WELFARE STATE and Government Junkies voting for a living)


How to Cook a Golden Goose (Jan 2013)
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-to-cook-golden-goose.html
(Crony Capitalism of the Welfare State; Bush & Obama = Hoover & Roosevelt)


THE LAW by Frederic Bastiat - highlights (Feb 2013):
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-law-excerpts.html
(THE BEST FREEDOM BOOK EVER - what Government should -- and should not do)


CONSENT of the Governed (Mar 2013):
http://libertyalumnidiscussions.blogspot.com/2013/03/consent-of-governed.html
(DEMOCRACY IS DESTROYING AMERICA - and the Founders' Limited Republic)

SCIENCE = INDUCTION + DEDUCTION

by James Craig Green
Edited 12/10/2012 and 8/21/2014

Science is not fact.

Science is not truth.

Science is not absolute.

Science can never be "settled."

SCIENCE is the creation of theories attempting to explain observations. According to philosopher of science KARL POPPER, any theory that cannot be falsified (proven wrong) by experimentation is not science. This important perspective illustrates why scientific theories and laws may have to be changed from time to time.

Science depends on INDUCTION  to create theories, and DEDUCTION to apply them. Each is dependent on the other, since deductions from applying existing theories may produce contradictions from future observations, dictating the revision of those theories. A scientific LAW is nothing more than a theory which has withstood many experiments that have corroborated it (failed to disprove it) over a period of time. This does NOT mean the theory has been "proven" for all time.

INDUCTION is extrapolation from the specific (observations, measurements and experiments) to the general (hypotheses, theories and laws). For example, Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation ("law of gravity") says that every mass in the universe exerts a force on every other mass in the universe proportional to the product of their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Measurement inaccuracies applied over large distances can be significant. This is why the Apollo missions to the moon required course corrections based on radar measurements of their actual, rather than predicted, location at times. This was demonstrated in the movie Apollo 13 when Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) said after shutting down the spacecraft's guidance system, "We just put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver's seat." What he meant by that was, without the guidance system to constantly measure the error of Newton's laws (of motion and gravity), they would not know how to correct these errors until the system was turned back on.

The important thing to know about Newton's "law of gravity" is that no human has ever tested or measured this phenomenon except on earth, the moon, or by remote observations of distant celestial bodies. Since man has NEVER tested this "universal" law anywhere else, no one can be certain that it applies throughout the universe, under all possible conditions.

Once a HYPOTHESIS (educated guess) is tested by experiment without being falsified, it may be called a theory. A scientific "law" is nothing more than a theory with many successful experiments supporting it. It is important to realize that no experiment can PROVE a scientific theory, but can support or refute it.

One lesson to be learned from this is that every scientific theory (and law) is based on FAITH that it applies to conditions and places for which it has not been tested. This uncertainty - the possibility of future revision or rejection - is why scientific theories are not, and cannot be, absolute.

DEDUCTION in science is the application of a general theory to a specific case. For example, starting with Newton's law of gravity, one can calculate the gravitational force between the earth and moon, if one knows the mass of each and the distance between them. Once these input parameters are known, there is only one answer, within a chosen level of accuracy (number of decimal places). All experiments are limited by the accuracy of measurement.

Now, the bottom line, and the source of disagreement between some scientists and/or philosophers:


INDUCTION (the source of all scientific theories) is creative (non-rational) because it depends on creating something new that never before existed (a made-up hypothesis, theory or law). Several competing theories/hypotheses/laws might explain the same observations. (The Earth was once visualized as resting on the back of a giant turtle). An example of INDUCTION is Newton's law of gravity.

In his early 20th century work in physics, Albert Einstein concluded that Newton's law did not take into account how gravity bends light. Although it took many years (waiting for technology and observational conditions to catch up), Einstein's claim that Newton's law was not universally valid was finally confirmed by experiment in 1919, facilitated by the observation of a total solar eclipse of the sun by the moon. No one knows what future data, experiment or new theory will partially or wholly replace today's theories, none of which are absolute or proven for all time.

This is one reason why Dr. Richard Hammling, former Los Alamos and Bell Labs scientist, summarized the following in a 1986 Presentation at a Bell Communications Seminar:

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never know the flaws. If you doubt too much you won't get started.


DEDUCTION is rational, because it rigidly applies the rules of logic without deviation. Logic is a human word/mind game that begins with arbitrary assumptions and rules, which dictate how the game is played. Like mathematics, it has nothing to do with REALITY, though it may be used to better understand reality.

When theories or laws change from INDUCTION based on new experiments - as with Einstein's modification of Newton's Law of Gravity - the very same rigid logic of DEDUCTION now has a changed result, due to the underlying change in the Scientific theory or law. The modified version now produces a different result for the changed theory or law, which was not so absolute after all.

See NEWTON'S LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION

and  ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION OF EINSTEIN

Adam Smith's DISMAL SCIENCE

by James Craig Green

 

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus predicted mass starvation in Europe, since the population was growing much faster than the food supply. A few decades later, Thomas Carlyle would call Adam Smith's new science of economics the dismal science, in part because of Malthus's prediction. Malthus turned out to be massively wrong however, because he didn't consider the potential for human ingenuity to expand agricultural production through economic incentives.

Contrary to Adam Smith's new science, governments in the Twentieth Century learned to promise almost endless benefits without apparent cost, by following the so-called Keynesian model of deficit spending, ignoring Adam Smith's "invisible hand." England's John Maynard Keynes had proposed this for a bad economy, paying back deficits when economic activity recovered. But, governments soon learned they could get away with expanding public debt almost endlessly to provide a lifetime of growth based on a flawed economic model. This completely violated the natural controls markets have by eliminating the risk of loss and the price communication between supply and demand.

In Great Myths of the  Great Depression, Lawrence Reed points out that it was government intervention, and not free markets, that created and sustained the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. An online version of this important work may be found at fee.org. A better understanding of Keynes' big government economics and its free market counter arguments may be gained from the Austrian School of Economics led by Ludwig von Mises, Freidrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard. See mises.org, the website for the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

The massive growth of government spending and promises during our lifetimes has resulted in the accumulation of future unfunded liabilities exceeding 60 trillion dollars, which former Comptroller General of the U.S. David Walker says is unsustainable. See pgpf.org. Many people think this was the result of laissez-faire or free market capitalism, but they ignore the government's 100-year war on prosperity and the markets that provided it.

Since 1890, when federal antitrust laws were first enacted, government intervention in the markets that produce all wealth has expanded multiple times. This included the creation of the Federal Reserve and income tax in 1913, the Smoot-Hawley tariff implemented by Republican President Hoover in 1930, the New Deal programs begun by Hoover and continued by Democrat President Roosevelt for more than a decade, and a series of welfare state programs, including massive corporate welfare, ever since. Each of these interventions made the economy worse, but the intoxication of immediate benefits for some, like the heroin addict's high, felt too good to stop.

Economics may be thought of as the allocation of scarce resources. But, this is lost on those who rely on government to solve their real or imagined problems at everyone else’s expense. The most dangerous narcotic in a democratic society is endless government freebies. Markets work because transactions are voluntary. Without the perception of a net gain by both the buyer and seller, neither of whom is forced to participate, the transaction would not take place. One of the most important, but least understood aspects of markets is their ruthless punishment of failure. When market participants make mistakes, they tend to be the ones punished, by failure of their investments, business plans, loss of capital or their businesses. That is, unless government steps in to "help" them, like the recent bailouts of banks, auto companies and other failed businesses.

Today, many people think business is inherently evil, but they confuse fantasy with reality. Free market reforms are needed today, not to be confused with government subsidies to business which Adam Smith called mercantilism. Business makes everything you eat, wear, live in, drive, play with, or use in any conceivable way. But, business doesn’t give you everything you want for free, because without both the profit incentive and risk of loss, these things would not be available. Today's mistrust of business by politicians was widespread in the Soviet Union, where few goods were available, of poor quality, prices were high, and there was no choice.

It was business and voluntary charity that delivered the goods to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, while cops became looters and the feds wouldn’t let trucks full of food, clothing and other essentials into the City. Now, the same government agency that screwed up the levees in the first place (Army Corps of Engineers) is being rewarded with the expensive task of doing it again.

Although the dismal science can't compete with government when it comes to unrealistic short term promises, it always outperforms government in the long run, because addicts must eventually must enter rehab or die.