DC Power Plant Continues To Burn Coal, Environmentalists Fume

The DC Chapter’s Sierra Club stated late last week that “recently, the Defense Logistics Agency solicited bids for 20,000 tons of coal for delivery to the Plant in 2013. This comes to more than 220,000 pounds of coal burned per day during heating season.”

When Beauty Is Not Truth - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Like a more famous student of prediction, Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise (Penguin), Orrell thinks that climate scientists have too much faith in the accuracies of the models they use to forecast global warming. (Not unlike physics, short-to-medium-term weather forecasting "has kind of hit a wall," he says.) While he doesn't doubt that global warming is occurring or that greenhouse gasses are the cause, he thinks the problems that bedevil weather forecasting—feedback loops and unpredictable "emergent" events, including cloud formations—necessarily complicate climate forecasts, too.

To Michael Mann, however, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, that argument "betrays a lack of understanding" of the distinction between short-term and long-term predictions. "Even though I can't predict the exact distribution of clouds, I can predict with a great degree of confidence that it will be warmer in six months than in 12 months" because of the rhythms of the seasons, he says. He adds that Orrell's accounts of climatologists' predictive errors, in his book amount to "cherry-picking the history."   [Hey Michael:  I also can predict that summer will be warmer than winter.  That doesn't mean I have any faith in bogus climate models.]

Flashback: Remember when we almost spent $45 trillion based on some secret Fortran code written by left-wing idiots with no common sense?

The equations are written in Fortran, a computer language that is, as Dr. Schmidt puts it, "very old and not very trendy." The computer code is 126,327 lines, to be exact, and when Dr. Schmidt scrolls through it on his computer screen, it looks like nothing so much as an extensive (and incomprehensible) grocery list.

Twitter / RyanMaue: Temperatures ahead of cold ...

[Are these temperature changes the result of CO2 moving around?] Temperatures ahead of cold front 40°F above normal vs. 40°F below normal behind front. pic.twitter.com/xDdxwupx