$Trillions on a Roll of the Dice

When “Let’s use bad science and anti-math to justify our blowing the economy of the entire planet to try to control an average global temperature swing that’s far, far, FAR smaller than pretty much any place experiences on any given day” becomes the best cover story Leftists can come up with for their real agenda of “Let’s grab all the power we can, and redistribute more wealth than may arguably be in existence to ourselves, our cronies, and the blocks of voters we can thereby guarantee will vote for use in perpetuity”, and still get away with it, then our country is in dire straits indeed. 

Consider this:  An iterative model of a closed system containing only 100 evenly weighted factors (or elements), each of which is known to 99% accuracy, will still only give a correct prediction a little more than a third of the time.
(0.99^100 = 0.366032, or just under 37% accuracy)

Let’s put this in terms Gamers (RPGers) will understand:

Hat tip: Wikipedia.org

In the gaming world (Note: I am not a gamer, but I’ve been exposed, and have had my shots), what you and I would normally consider a “pair of dice” simply doesn’t cut it.  Ask a gamer if you can borrow a die to make a roll, and if he’s friendly, knows you, and doesn’t have any germ phobias, he’ll probably say something like “Sure! How many sides?”, because from his point of view “six” simply cannot be assumed.

What the greater world (or “Mundania”) considers a pair of dice, RPGers know to be “two D6”. There are LOTS of other types of dice, typically ranging from 4-sided, running up through the standard Platonic solids (which top out at 20-sided or D20), and then further through a crazy collection of interconnected triangles, rhombuses, kites, and pentagons, up to a silly golf-ball looking sphere with 100 flattened planes (they’re not interconnected shapes), called a “Zocchihedron”, which even gamers – despite their penchant for silly names – call a D100.

If you take a standard D100 die, and replace the numbers with 99 GREEN dots and 1 RED dot, you have a way of demonstrating a factor known with 99% accuracy.

Rolling “GREEN” means that item’s prediction was correct.

Rolling “RED”, of course, busts your prediction because who knows? This factor might control the catalyzation rate of a crucial chemical reaction… Or it might function as an exponent for a key figure in an equation.  Could be anything. Regardless, “RED” is wrong.

So here we go with our experiment:

1.       You're jumping the gun! First, grab 100 of these specially-marked D100 dice.

 

2.       You’ll probably need a large plastic storage tub or cardboard box, because look – only 42 fit on this tub lid:

 

3.       Roll them all simultaneously on a hard surface. Try not to be too startled by the noise.

4.       Count the number of RED dots showing up on top.  If the number is 1 or greater, mark that run down as an abject failure. This is your "Gore Factor".  If the number is ZERO, count that as a win.  You will need to keep track of your win/abject-fail ratio as you go along.

5.       Gather all the dice back up again.

6.       Repeat Steps 2 through 5 a couple of hundred times, or until you simply cannot stand to experiment further.

Remember: “ALL GREEN” in this example means your model functioned correctly, and its prediction was accurate.  So tally up your wins and abject failures, and if you’ve been paying very close attention, you should notice that the odds of any particular throw of the dice coming up “all green” are just under 37%.

In other words… Your Gore Factor is just over 63%!  You abjectly failed most of the time! In a closed system! Where every single element was known to an extremely high degree of certainty! How do you feel about that??? How do you feel about yourself after falling on your face, time after time, after having been handed such pristine experimental conditions?

Huh? HUH? Do you even know how you rate?

Well, at least if you're not Al Gore, you still rate way, WAY better than an IPCC not-exactly-Nobel-laureate-despite-making-such-claims climatologist!  Infinitely better, in fact.  You see, our planet’s climate, as far as we can tell, is basically about as “open” a system as “open systems” get.

Consider this:

• How many factors are involved in modeling the climate?  (If you don’t have any idea, then either take a wild guess, OR – better yet – guess whether or not the total number of factors is even known.)

• What is our degree of confidence that we've accounted for all the important elements?

• How confident are we in our understanding of the factors we DO know about (an error factoring or degree of accuracy variable)?

• Is any of our data accuracy legitimately in dispute?

Spoiler: Yes, data accuracy is in dispute, for a host of reasons including but not limited to:

• Unavailability of original station logs (possibly for underhanded motives)
• Known improper placement of thermal data gatherers - the corrections of which have been refused while the data they've collected continues to be treated as non-suspect by IPCC climatologists
• Non-standard and non-uniform adjusting or "weighting" of temperature data
• The refusal of climate prima-donnas to answer questions about their use, maintenance, and their archiving of ostensibly public data

• How are the factors weighted, and how confident are we in the accuracy of our weighting of them (another error factoring or degree of accuracy variable)?  

• On top of it all, please don't forget that there's always considerable dispute even amongst the various pro-humans-are-to-blame-for-global-warming crowd as to the accuracy of this or that particular climate model. 

So far, the ONLY thing - mathematically, experimentally, and experiencially - that the pro-AGW crowd's complex iterative climate models have given us are wrong answers - because frankly that's all they CAN provide.

Such models can be useful as general guideposts (Example: closed system gas deposition vs. temperature vs. time - in certain industrial processes). But even in small closed systems they're not meant for, nor can they be honestly used for, accurately predicting specific outcomes.

However, as far as gigantic, wide-ranging open systems are concerned, from a “climate scientist’s” point of view they are absolutely GREAT at producing their sponsors' desired results, AND (not coincidentally) for keeping the gravy train a'rollin'!

With such an unabated avalanche of abject failure, how is it that they’re able to sell their message to the public? I mean there’s "uninformed voters", certainly, but if you’re never right, don’t you think even they might notice?

Well, sadly, there a real PR benefit to using multifactorial or complex iterative models. The insidiously seductive thing here is that while such models seem to only return wrong answers, it turns out that at the same time they’re never completely wrong.  Remember, in our closed-system RPG example, the model usually failed to make an accurate prediction (nearly 2/3 of the time), however the odds of the dice coming up “all red” are pretty much indistinguishable from zero. It won’t happen. It technically CAN, of course, however the odds are 1 to 1E200 against, which means if you were to toss all 100 dice a trillion-to-the-16th-power-times-a-hundred-million* times, you should hit “all red” one time somewhere in there.  Good luck!

There’s always going to be some green showing. Even in the big wide wild world of fraud- uh, "Climate Science". There will be aspects on each run of their models that jive with currently-observable reality, so they have an easy sell to get more funding for additional necessary tweaks and adjustments, all the while trumpeting the “progress!” they’re making by (in many cases) taking an already hopelessly fail-ridden model, and adding additional factors to it.

They claim they’re making their models more accurate.  Since it is safe to assume they understand the basics of “math”, we know they’re lying. They’re not producing accurate results. And they don’t care to. They’re producing propaganda. I’d say “more snow for the snow jobs” except given we’re talking AGW here let’s just leave it at “more hot air”.

You see, there are only two known, proven, guaranteed ways to win at gambling:

1. Every time you lose, double your bet.  If you have sufficiently deep pockets, then in the long term, if you quit after a winning hand, you’ll come out ahead. That’s just math.
2. Be the House. All odds favor the House. Push goes to the House. Be the House.

Our government has figured out that since they make the rules, and print the money, they can play both sides of the table at the same time. Win/Win, as long as the cover story holds out.

Or, to put it another way, since the government has no money of its own, and even though they print the stuff it is all just IOU’s backed up by taxes on the economy… Lose/Lose.

The polar bears are used to the Arctic Sea. They’ll be fine. They won’t drown.

I’m curious how the politicians would fare though…

--- not much later ---

---

*A trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x trillion x 100 million throws of all 100 dice

Update 01/19+/2017 - Had some complaints about the math notation. Attempted to make it more clear and standardized.