A MarketPlace of Ideas

Have a gander at the evidence…..

Click to hear secretly taped Romney conversations.

Played footsy with Ted Kennedy.

Bid on rare Mitt Duck Print on ebay.

The following question must arise if you are intellectually curious but not technically trained:

    “What is the value of a computer model?”

If you can get a honest capable technical person who has done computer modeling before to answer your question you will get the following multipart answer:

1)  Computer models ABSOLUTE results reflect the inclinations of the operator.  These computers are just like cars with a more complex steering wheel.  If you steer the car one direction do not be surprised if you end up in farmer Brown’s corn field.  If you steer it another way, carefully following all the bends in the road as they appear to you well you can end up in Chicago.   The problem is to get to Chicago you have to do everything RIGHT.  This is very hard to do and if you already know how to do it well then it makes no sense to go to Chicago if you are a scientist.  You already know how to get there?  Publish the results and go to North Dakota. 

2) The  process of computer modeling is like a jujitsu / karate for the mind.  You can practice your mental moves and get ideas of how systems fit together.   As a more concrete example imagine you are firing a potato out of your potato gun and you want to calculate where it will land.

You would model your potatos flight with a parabola as a first cut.  After measuring the results of the potatos flight would you see some correlation with the calculated results.  However you would notice alot of discrepancies.  As you became more and more mathematically aware you would realize that wind, air resistance and shape of the potato are affecting the results.  

By this method scientists and engineers are supposed to work out their minds to make their minds more familiar with the realities they are studying.    In our example the easy to see dynamic is the parabola.   The not so easy to see is the wind drag affects and they are not easy to calculate.  What you would do to refine your model is make math models and see if they agree with the results.  This being a relatively closed system would allow you to do that because you can change system parameters like the angle and velocity of firing and measure results.

In the case of Man-Made-Global-Warming (MMGW) the models all consists of the type of results where they are not easy to calculate.  Thus what the modelers need to do is to change the input parameters  ( angle and velocity of the potato example above )  and check how well their models predict their results.   The problem as I see it  ( and full employment act to MMGW Fear Factory workers )  is that they can not check their models by changing the input parameters.   We do not control the weather as easily as the angle and firing velocity of a potato gun !!

Thus the MMGW Fear Factory Workers are scientific ethics challenged. ( In plain words they are lying ).   They present a model as scientific data when in reality they are presenting the results of a mental workout.   What they are saying has as much meaning as me saying I did 20 bench presses with 300lbs.  Impressive that I can do the work but meaningless otherwise.

So when someone tells you that the models show this or show that, translate it using your own internal BabbleFish to be “My opinion is”