Brad DeLong explains what Paul Romer's recent paper is about. It's a smackdown of ideological economics directed at the Chicago School (George Stigler, Robert Lucas, etc.) Are key neoclassical assumptions "innocent" sophistry based on a Noble Lie? Or is it the Big Lie?
Grasping Reality
Noah Smith, Paul Romer, "Mathiness", and Baking the Politics into the Microfoundations...
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley
This questioning of models is happening in the other quack field, climatology, whose development has sort of tracked economics with unreal models, abject failure, mocking the critics and then an inability to deny reality any longer. Climatology is now in the phase where they have failed so miserably, they are officially pressuring the media outlets to label skeptics as "deniers" and asking for government to refuse people access to government who don't support their philosophy or point out their flaws. As the modellers are being forced to make public the real measured data, before adjustments, level headed discussion can now take place about actual levels of sea rise, actual amounts of ice melt, actual ocean temperature changes, the real temperature measurements themselves. It forces everyone to come clean about how much of what they publish is ideology vs fact. The so called "crazy" skeptics in political debate were actually right. To be sure, lots of crazy people flock to the political positions of "denial" or people paid to predict catastrophe obviously predict catastrophe.
ReplyDeleteThe reality and measurements seem to support the skeptic and scientific position that climate change is real but pretty wildly exaggerated by climatologists and the causation isn't clear because the proposed mechanisms of action in the models have never, ever, once yet produced realistic predictions that have come to pass. (In science, when a hypothesis doesn't match reality, the hypothesis is tossed out, not the reality!) In climatology, they haven't tossed out the hypothesis, they simply adjusted the measurements to fit their models!
There's propaganda for sure in climate. But the 'skeptics' are just as bad.
ReplyDeleteIn a dynamic system with control feedback there isn't a steady change. The homeostatic mechanism dampens the change until it can no longer cope and it breaks quickly to a higher value.
That's why we have earthquakes. You wouldn't have said Nepal was an earthquake prone zone until last week. Pompeii wasn't particularly volcanic for 400 years. And of course the financial collapse was preceded by the Great Moderation.
The real data is pretty "bad", CO2 is rising fast, of that we are certain. What isn't certain is the immediate climate catastrophe. We know for certain that humans need to be careful not to allow CO2 to resume the long term down trend in CO2 that would make it hard for plants to survive below 150-200 ppm and is usually related to glaciation, humans also probably don't want to get above maybe 700 to 1000 ppm where plant growth peaks and animal respiration can be impacted. We thought temperature would correlate with CO2 closely but we were wrong, it doesn't. But even if climate isn't going to be a catastrophe, the point is that we still have to reduce our production of CO2 and other pollution in decades to come because it is a biological necessity.
ReplyDeleteRyan take a look at the pole shifts:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhYdYD2CsnA
In the south it has actually now shifted off the continent (away from tru south) and in the north it has shifted on to the ocean (towards tru north)
So you have all of those charged particles (100's of thousands of amperes) now accelerated thru the northern ice flows and less so in the south...
Like a giant microwave oven...
so we see the melting in the north and not in the south... as the current flows are now thru ice in the north and away from the ice in the south...
My hope is that all of the newly released fresh water is eventually transported to the drier regions of the continents and brings more land into productive use.. and the transition period is not too volatile...