Re:1 in 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked to Commit Scient...
by jplayer01 on Saturday November 03, 2018 @05:52PM
(#18372688)
There's enough proof that we're destroying our environment on a grand scale - literally the only place that we can survive as a species. All of what you said is just rationalization for the kind of behavior that has gotten us to this point and will continue far into the future. It's easier to deny anything is wrong than it is to do anything about the problem. And I'm not at all surprised by how many climate skeptics there are here - intellectuals and really fucking smart people who are incredibly good at rationalizing their behaviors and beliefs to avoid the feeling of having to do anything and who think they're able to think about the subject matter more clearly and productively than the scientists who work on it day in and day out.
The bugs, if serious enough, can make it not scientific, in the same way that a paper that has grave errors in it is wrong and thus obviously not scientfic. So, before we do a thorough review of the code, we should treat it with due scepticism.
EDIT: this can also be expressed in terms of risk analysis. For typical software, the consequence of a bug is low - most software is commercial, so the impact of the bug will be limited to that company's bottom line (with exceptions of software that can kill, but these people already are serious about bugs). Also, most bugs in most software are either highly evident (the button does not work, you get random segfaults etc.) or have limited impact.
On the other hand, the bugs in climate change models, given their "pipeline" nature (wrong result from one module is propagated downstream all the way to the final prediction of expected temperature change), can quite often have severe impact. They can also be not evident at all - they can for example change the final outcome predicition by 1 C.
Compound that with the fact these predictions are used to make trillion dollar decisions on global policies, and you can see that the actual damage done by bugs is not unlikely to be in the trillions. And that's why I say it's probably wise to subject the models to extreme scrutiny.