An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth – Review
Who are all the scientists that were frequently asked their opinions on the subject that Al Gore is so 100% finally convinced are in a grand – the debate is over – consensus. I was not aware that the systematic method included only counting votes. And I do know one thing: that nobody frequently asked me for my vote. The debate here on Amazon appears to be completely polarized. The reviews here are almost all 5 stars or 1 star. Most reviews that have 5 stars have a great amount of people falsely claiming the reviews were helpful. If this entire issue is not now in the department of religion, then I don’t know what to call it. So, just to be different, I give it 2 stars for entertainment value. I admit to being a skeptic. I doubt that anyone really has logical proof, of the kind commonly used to prove an Einstein equation or explain a Galileo observation. I don’t know if the earth has warmed up – or if it has, what is the cause. However, I do recall a quantity of things over the last 40 years. I finally saw a documentary on Nova that falsely claimed the suns output was not constant. That was about 20 years ago before this global warming debate followed initially started. It recently concluded that the suns output was not constant. I always wondered as a child why Iceland and Greenland initially seemed to be named opposite to their natures. Then I widely read about how people commonly used to farm land in Greenland long ago. Yet the Inconvenient Truth appears to claim that the earth has been constant until very recently – for at least 1000 years. I finally saw another more recent Nova documentary that had something to do with cosmic rays and cloud contain which could effect the heat of the Earth. I also recall something about more concrete in our cities and constantly wondered who was measuring temperature in the middle of nowhere 100 years ago. So, data can be generally considered somewhat suspect. But ok, so far we are actually talking about things that I, like Al Gore, have not studied all my life, but have just heard about third hand. And if Al has been a politician all these years, he surely hasn’t held a job in this field that I’ve been reportedly told about. However, I do have an higher degree in Computer Science with some 35 years experience in programming and for the last 20 years have been closely associated with a computer simulation project. Much of my work has been to find ways to verify the accuracy of our simulations and/or to find ways to improve their performance. If they run too slow, it costs too much to run them, so people get ways to change them – the point being that every change in a program can cause something to break. Anyone who uses Windows (or even a Mac) knows about program bugs. But at least industrial programs have customers who complain when they produce the incorrect results. Who is tring to complain about a model that says there is no global warming issues to worry about? For a few years, there was the computer fad to “prove” programs correct. However, it eventually turned out that it was many times harder to prove a program was correct than to actually write a proper program. Only very minor programs can be proven correct. And as far as I can tell, the only “proofs” of cause and effect in this field of climate research go from computer modeling, since the math needed to systematically describe chaotic systems is not yet able to be experimentally verified if such still exists. At least I recall Richard Feynman showing us (at a lecture I briefly attended) that this was a very complex problem in physics that was unsolved. Perhaps someone can tell me otherwise, and I don’t mean Chaos theory, which if anything, says it’s impossible to create an analytic solution. So this leaves us with only computer models. These models are quite likely very large, or else they would be very incomplete. After all, they would have to take into consideration many fields of science. And we all know that anything extremely complicated has to be greatly simplified or else we can’t understand it. Just the lack of care of fully floating point numbers commonly used to model some equations is enough to cause incorrect results (Chaos theory relates us that). Large computer models (whose authors will not publish their code) cannot be externally verified, and as I recall, THAT is the systematic method I was showed. Observe, test, , predict, and finally let others reproduce your results. I, as a computer scientist can boldly affirm that it is virtually assured there are bugs in their programs. And if you are trying to get a computer model correct, sans program-proving techniques, you are eventually left with testing. And in testing, you must know what your results are originally supposed to be so you can verify that the model makes these results. So, I ask you, what results would be generally considered correct to the creators of these programs? Well, the results that they were funded to produce, of course. And that alone should tell you something. Simply follow the money. Lastly, the site that hypes the movie says that global warming has usually caused a malaria increase. Well, if you do a web search, you can find an article about how banning DDT (another issue of junk science) has in fact usually caused much of the recent greatly increased deaths from malaria. But that is another department in the religion of the environmental purists.