Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Is This Science? A comparison... Dr. Willie Soon vs. Professor Inez Fung


A while back I spent some time with a video Anthony Watts was touting -  It was the infamous Willie Soon PhD, solar physicist turned climate science "debunker."  He was giving his "scientific" explanations for why he believes pretty much all of climate science is a hoax... and worse. 
Posted on  by Anthony Watts 
Dr. Willie Soon Guest Comment: ‘Is What I Say Beyond the Boundaries of Reasonable Discussion?’
Guest essay by Russell Cook

Dr. Soon seemed comfortable voicing all sorts of conspiracy laced claims towards others who have complained about the quality of his work, while attempting to project an image as a straight shooter, in spite of a rather generous income provided by very politically motived interests.


For further details see: 
http://www.desmogblog.com/denial-hire-willie-soon-s-career-fueled-big-oil-coal-and-koch-money 
http://www.desmogblog.com/willie-soon 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/willie-soon-climate-change-_b_886232.html 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Soon
When Soon got to the science it was painful to watch his act of transparently ignoring everything he doesn't like.  I wish some high school science class would take the time to expose it's many deceptions and acts of salesmanship rather than attempts at teaching.  

In any event, it made a great contrast when . . .   

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. . .  I listen to another video lecture.  

This one by Professor Inez Fung who specializes in Climate Models, she was explaining her science to a lay-audience.  It sure was an interesting informative talk.

The contrast in style between Professor Fung and Dr. Soon was dramatic.  It's difficult to understand how rational people wouldn't recognize the difference between Willie Soon's salesmanship and Professor Fung's teaching.

You decide:

Anatomy of a Climate Model: 

How Robust are Climate Projections?

February 8, 2011 presentation by Prof. Inez Fung, UC Berkeley.

GoogleTechTalks | Feb 11, 2011 | 55:30

ABSTRACT
The first successful numerical weather forecast was made on the ENIAC (with fewer than 10 words memory) in 1950. This talk traces the development of atmospheric General Circulation Models (GCMs) for weather forecasting, to Global Climate Models (GCMs) and Earth System Models (ESMs) to illustrate the guts and gore of the huge codes. If we cannot predict the weather beyond 2 weeks, what do we mean by climate projections for the next century?


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2 comments:

Hwan said...

Interesting title.

How does her talk tell us anything about the robustness of climate projections?

Nonsense.

This is real climate talk by Chris Essex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhipLNeda4

citizenschallenge said...


And what pray tell does Prof. Essex actually explain?

He ignores big parts of the real story...

he uses politically loaded jokes when he'd promised serious science discussion and explanations...

he makes grand claims about his own insights and mastery, but his academic record is quite thin...

makes a few outrageous - unsupported claims about others dishonesty...

He dismisses the "hockey stick" out of hand - but ignores the basic well known and unavoidable physics of GHGs -

... or that "hockey stick" shaped graphs have been produced in many dozens of studies examining various aspects of Earth's climate history.

he implies that these GCMs are all scientists have that points at global warming - something that's as false as it gets.

His YouTube talk you shared is another political performance bud, it ain't science.

Want science? Listen to serious lectures... not politically soaked arm waving. After all a statistician can prove anything he want's to an uncritical audience.
{Science in a vacuum}

That's the beauty of the greater climatological community, they are constantly working over each others idea, weeding out the weak, learning from lessons, and steadily improving.

Allow me to recommend a few:
http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2013/08/index-for-my-climate-science-video.html
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But, the biggest lie Prof. Essex and folks like you broadcast is the notion that Climate Models need to be 99.9% accurate before we should pay attention to what they are telling us.

We know what we need to know, the past decades have been giving us plenty of physical proof that we are continuing a very dangerous experiment at full throttle... a fairly insane thing to do :- (