The Deadly Pride of Climate Science

Written by Stephen Wells

From what has been published, you may be aware that I have a general disdain for academics and self proclaimed experts.

Not being religious, the best argument I can find for becoming so is the Biblical section on the seven deadly sins, which it places Pride as the number one no no. And don’t academics just ooze the stuff?! The complete and utter conviction that their lifetime of research into a specific area warrants a complete and utter devotion and acceptance to their view of this particular part of reality as gospel. Most importantly that they can’t be shown to be wrong by anyone who hasn’t spent at least 10 years in the university system and another 10 in a related career.

History is full of examples of this kind of Pride and of the subsequent fall. Rather than having any more chance at being right than the rest of us, academics and experts just tend to be wrong in much more spectacular detail. So if anything were ever to convert me into a bible bashing Christian preacher, it would be my nausea of the Pride of academics.

Not being an expert in anything, I have become reasonably competent in a few things though, over 50 years on earth and over 60 different jobs I’ve had since my first one at age 13. Between the ages of 19 and 29 the majority of my working life was in the Casino industry as a Croupier.

One perverse pleasure was watching expert mathematicians destroy their lives trying to beat the odds at roulette. I know I should feel guilty, but it’s that whole Pride of the expert thing again. It’s just really hard to feel sympathy for an arrogant A hole who is determined to prove how much better he is than everyone else, who then gets shown to be wrong in the most humiliating manner of all. By literally losing the shirt off his back. Especially if your job involves being subservient to said A hole right up until the moment that you take his shirt.

The reason I would occasionally find expert mathematicians on the other side of the roulette table from me is probability mathematics. The reason for this article is that statistical analysis is a major part of climate change alarmism on the one hand and failure to even consider random variation is endemic on the other.

In either case the experts are arrogantly losing the shirt of a back. Only it’s not their shirt off their backs they’re betting with this time. They are betting with yours.

If you add up all of the numbers on a roulette wheel (1 through 36) the total equals 666. As previously mentioned, this author isn’t very religious. People who aren’t religious might find this information fun trivia when first learning of it.

A roulette game is truly random. My trainer back when I was learning to deal the game once stopped the wheel, held the ball at the rim above a number and told us to place a bet. He then gently let the ball go so it rolled slowly towards the same number. Again and again and again. Even with removing the variable of a spinning wheel travelling at differing speeds and a ball being spun at varying speeds in the opposite direction, there was still no way to predict where the ball would stop.

So let me make my first point to the climate change scientists. Even with exact knowledge of the odds and a physically controlled environment, where we can run close to the exact same scenario again and again we can still get chaotic and unpredictable outcomes.

But this is not the reason for mathematicians losing their shirts. For that we need to look at probability mathematics.

Douglas Adams hilariously delved into the subject in the TV show (and books and radio plays) A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which was a favourite of mine at age 11. The Heart Of Gold spaceship being run by an “improbability drive” that would calculate how unlikely something was and run through a simulation enough times that what they wanted to occur (travel faster than light to anywhere in the universe) would occur almost instantaneously. Turn off the safety device, though, and nuclear warheads could turn into a sperm whale and a pot plant instead of blowing up your ship.

It all makes for good fiction. Intuitively though, we humans live under the expectation that deviations from the norm will only go so far before swinging back into the law of averages. After all, Casinos always win, right? Casinos win by because they make use of the law of averages right?

No. Not entirely. This author recently made the mistake of using the story of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo to try and highlight the risks involved for Casinos on a favourite blog. This was to make a generic point with a few sentences, but because it is a skeptics blog fellow skeptics howled that the story is greatly exaggerated and that the casino simply didn’t have the funds to pay out on that particular night, didn’t go broke and that the man in question came back on subsequent occasions and lost all of his winnings and his shirt off his back too, in the end.

I know all of this of course. But the ridicule still came. Such is the risk of trying to tell a fun story to those with truly scientific minds. They just take all the fun out of it and shouldn’t be invited to parties.

The story is still used as a warning to casino managers though, to highlight the dangers of over exposure to risk and improbable situations. Just because you are not aware of something having happened, doesn’t mean it hasn’t, or can’t, or won’t.

The main tool of Casinos to secure profits is not the law of averages and probability on the roulette table (though it is still very important), the main way is to have lots of people simultaneously playing all of the numbers at the same time. If 37 people each bet a dollar on a different number one person will win and 36 will lose. The Casino will collect $36 from the losers.

All it has to do to guarantee a profit is to only pay the winner $35. But every time there is a big bet on just one number and no bets on the rest of the table, the Casino is exposed to risk and relies on the laws of probability not turning the roulette wheel into a sperm whale due to some A hole turning off the safety device on a cool new spaceship somewhere! It SHOULD always win over time, but nothing in life is guaranteed.

So the real question is not why does the Casino always win, but why do nearly all punters eventually lose? Is there a way to beat the laws of probability? The mathematicians who occasionally turned up at the Casino thought so.

Let’s take the simplest form of probability, the coin toss. Heads or tails. A 50/50 chance for one or the other. There is an apparent paradox. We “know” that over time that the distribution of heads and tails will work out roughly the same. A hundred coin tosses SHOULD yield roughly 50/50 of each. But what if after 100 tosses of the coin you’ve had 70/30?

What if, also, that the last 20 tosses were all heads? The mathematics seems to tell you two contradictory things. One is that over 200 tosses of the coin the odds are that things should even out and provide a number closer to 100/100. Ask yourself, what would YOU bet your money on over the next 100 coin tosses if you’d just witnessed the last 20 tosses being heads?

The other mathematics is that the odds aren’t averages based on past outcomes. Each coin toss is a separate event and the probability is constant for each toss. The coin is not a human being. It doesn’t have intelligence. Most importantly it doesn’t have memory. The coin doesn’t know that it has just landed on heads 20 times in a row.

The chances of it landing on heads a 21st time is still 50/50. Because theoretically it has taken 2^20 times to reach this outcome already. Also the chances of it landing on heads a further 20 times in a row is exactly the same as it was of landing on it 20 times in a row when you first started. And in an infinite universe anything is bound to happen sooner or later.

And yet and yet…! We “know” things average out over time. The Casino knows it too. On roulette the coin toss is replicated by the “even chance” bets. Red/Black, Odd/Even 1-18/19-36. The same person who pulled me up on the Monte Carlo story also pulled me up on the fact that a roulette wheel has another number: Zero. Doesn’t this extra number negate my whole argument?

Again no. Or at least the mathematicians didn’t think so. In the USA the roulette tables don’t just have one extra number, they have two: 0 and 00. If either come up when you have bet on red or black you lose your whole bet. In Europe they just have one zero and if it comes in when you are betting on red or black the casino will only take half of your money.

In effect the odds are 4 times better playing even chance bets in Europe as they are in the USA. It seems the Casino owners in America are just a little more paranoid than their European counterparts. More likely they are simply greedier.

In Europe the Casinos publish the history of what numbers have fallen on their roulette tables and any member of the public can buy a weekly journal that has nothing but the order of the numbers of each table, right across Europe. Which every now and then will show a table with a run of red/black/odd/even etc that defies credulity.

We do “know” that over time everything tends to even out. The question for the mathematicians is: will this evening out occur before the zero has fallen enough times to negate what they think should be a natural correction of an errant trend? I expect the owners of American Casinos prefer simply not to take the chance.

After ten year’s experience this Croupier can answer with an emphatic NO! The seeming paradox isn’t a paradox at all. The roulette wheel, has no more memory than the coin and the odds remain, now and always 50/50 (or more precisely 37/36 in the case of losing half your bet when the zero comes in). American Casino bosses can relax. Joe Pesci and Robert DiNiro don’t need to be called in to break anyone’s legs. The game is a “sure thing” and will remain so right up until the moment it isn’t.

So, all of that is fun trivia for you, as well as a very long story that seems to have little connection to climate change. What are the points of my my points, other than to poke fun at arrogant university educated mathematicians who should know better?

Well let’s take a look at some of the things we can learn from all of this. With roulette we know before hand exactly what the odds are. We know how many numbers we’ve got and we can calculate exactly what the chances are of something occurring and not occurring. We also have access to massive amounts of historical data so we can easily see what are the outliers and what is the norm.

But what if we didn’t know these things?

What if we don’t know before hand what the odds are of any particular event occurring and what if our data is so sparse that we can’t tell what is an outlier and what is the norm? What if we are betting on climate change, instead of roulette? How would we know that 20 years in a row of warm summers had a deterministic cause rather than was the result of random chance? How could we even differentiate between the two?

Statisticians arrogantly talk about “stand deviation” and “degrees of confidence”, as if it means something profound. Other alarmists brag about how they’ve ruled out all other possibilities other than CO2 for a global average temperature. We can expect some of them to go and play red or black in Casinos after a run of the opposite colour falling 20 times in a row, too.

Let’s go through some random variables in the earth’s climate and see just how absurd their Pride really is.

The first is the Stefan Boltzmann law, where temperature is proportional to the 4th root of energy. How can you attach any significance to changing average temperatures when they are not completely dependent on changing average energy?

The distribution of energy over the earth has a random aspect to it. Though the sun shines brightest at noon over the equator and not at all at night, exactly where the energy ends up is anyone’s guess. Sure it’s going to be warmer at the equator than the poles, during the day than night, but by how much? And when?

It takes very little energy to raise the temperature from -36C to -35C compared to raising the temperature from +35C to +36C according to the Stefan Boltzmann law.

So simply by having 1 watt per square meter less energy at the equator and 1 watt per square meter more at the North Pole during the winter we can make the average temperature of the planet warmer. We don’t need to “trap more heat” to do it. Just change where the energy ends up.

There is also really no way of accurately knowing whether the energy for the whole earth has gone up or down. Extra energy might be measured from satellites, but where did it come from?

Was it released into the atmosphere due to warmer waters rising from the depths? A change in Earth’s magnetic barrier? A change in cloud cover?

Another variable that we don’t even know we don’t know about? Have we measured an actual change in the whole, or just measured a change in the bit we happen to be measuring?

The fact is, is that the incoming energy, the outgoing energy and the distribution of that energy is constantly changing and, just like the roulette wheel, even though we might know (some of) the things that make the odds what they are, we have no way of predicting what that will result in, other than within very broad parameters.

Nor can we assign much significance to any causative agent to any historical data we might possess. The variables produce random unpredictable changes and we don’t know them all or what the odds are on any specific one.

We might look at sunspot numbers and decide that they both correlate well with periods of general warming and cooling and we can even point to a mechanism that can produce a cause and effect scenario of the two. But there we must stop.

Everything beyond this point is just an assumption. Because who is to say the 20 times in the past 10,000 years that a warm period correlated with high sunspot numbers wasn’t just an “unlikely” coincidence? That each occasion had a 50/50 chance of being sunspots and of being something else entirely, including random luck? And that’s just considering one variable that we do have some evidence of causative change.

Don’t get me started on all the twisting of the laws of thermodynamics to try and squeeze a degree Celsius warming out of man made CO2! Better to tell me the gas will cause Iran’s nuclear aspirations to turn into a pot plant! At least CO2 has some relationship with plants. I’m sure Douglas Adams mentioned it somewhere.

Consider a few of the variables that affect either the amount of energy earth has or the distribution of the energy earth has, at any particular moment in time:

1)Elliptical orbit of Earth (there is an approximate 90 watt per square meter change in top of atmosphere strength of sunlight between January and July. (45 times greater than the warning of a 2 watt per square meter average increase from the IPCC) 2) The changing orbit of the earth. Each year earth’s orbit is either slightly more or slightly less elliptical than the previous year depending on where in the orbital cycle we are. 3) The barycentre of the solar system is constantly changing. The orbit of the planets pull on the Sun as well as the Sun pulling on the planets changing where the sun is (closer or further away) in relation to Earth and when it is closer or further away during the year/years 4) The strength of sunlight is constantly changing. Estimates vary on the amount of change, but even small amounts at different periods of time during earth’s proximity to the sun adds a significant variable 5) The distribution of EM frequencies of the sun is constantly changing. Different frequencies have different effects on different substances in earth’s atmosphere 6) The jet stream is constantly changing. A big one for energy distribution. A “wavy” jet stream will result in a different average temperature as a smooth one with the same total energy. If the amount of energy is changing at the same time, your guess is as good as mine as to what is going to happen. Ask Piers Corbyn. He seems to be having a better run than most at placing a winning bet. 7) Cloud cover. Another huge variable and one that can influence both the amount of energy coming in and where it is absorbed and distributed. 8) Different heat capacity. Different things take differing amounts of time to warm up and cool down. Direct sunlight being absorbed in the ocean has a different temperature result than being absorbed on land and takes differing amounts of time to achieve. See changes in cloud cover again. 9)10)and beyond) Cosmic rays. Where we are in relation to the rest of the galaxy. Etc, etc.

If you haven’t gotten the picture by now, you are probably an academic and an expert in your field or a cult member who worships them. I’m sure that there is a Croupier out there who will get perverse pleasure in taking the shirt off your back. Take my advice: Go and read the bit in the Bible about Pride and the seven deadly sins. You don’t need to be religious.

There is too much we don’t know to “trust the experts”. In the end everything has an aspect of faith to it. The things we do know are good for making conversation at parties, but generally worthless for advising Governments. It’s time academics realised this and stopped inflating their egos with self importance. Or at the very least it’s time we stopped paying them for it.

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