Showing posts with label odin2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label odin2. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Odin2 lets debate Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao "Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements"


At EarthSky.org I read a good article yesterday explaining the reasons why the so called "Global warming hiatus never happened."

Going though the comments section one "odin2" made numerous posts.  Superficially many sounded sciencie and "proper" for example at one point scolding another commenter:  

"Your post is not responsive to the peer reviewed article that I cited or my post. There is a vast difference between making adjustments and corrections and manipulation fabrication of data. But, if you define the climate models as "reality' then manipulating the observed data to fit the observations is OK in the minds of Believers. Isn't it?"

But, look at the wording of that.  Who's being the "believer" of what?  No intelligent person has ever claimed that climate models are "reality" - they are tools to help teach us about our climate.  Also in real life, adjustments and corrections are justified and documented in the literature.

But OK, I'm a sucker for chasing such tossed bones and couldn't resist looking up the article in question.  Turned out to be by a couple economics professors; and it's printed in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics; and it turns out to start with a gish gallop of Republican/libertarian soundbites attacking Al Gore's AIT that liberally misrepresents AIT in the bargain.  

Then it goes on to model a hypothetical asymmetric information game: "Moreover, we introduce a new player in the game..." - "There are N+2 risk-neutral players in the game: N ex ante identical countries, a message sender, and an IEA(International Environmental Agreement). Each country faces a binary decision: whether or not to make one unit of abatement." 
  
It turned out to be a "What if?" exercise, nothing more.1

The article had nothing to do with climate science, let alone fluctuations in the surface temperature record.

After getting my belly full of odin2's game, I decided to write him a note.  Now I'm posting a reworked version over here as an invitation to him (or any like minded) for a constructive debate.