What set of observations would falsify the predictions of your understanding of Austrian economics?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/11...sified-618223/

Cliffs: none

These guys are all 'kinda big deal' in the field.

Has Austrian economics been falsified in your opinion? If so, which observations falsified AE?

Meh, absence of evidence isnt evidence of absence anyway. Boro should be able to respond to that question, its a fair one.

Lol, I really don't think you are following the line of questioning imo

I agree, I was just wondering if Fly thought that AE is already falsified.

Let me try to explain my perspective a little better. I have a very bleak view of the future of humanity (I'd guess there is a greater than 95% chance we are extinct within 100 years) but I don't think global warming is a reasonable threat. You'd have to have a runaway scenario for it to cause human extinction and I consider that highly unlikely.

I wish you would just say what you think is going to happen since I've asked a few times. Let me just throw some numbers out there even though all I know about this I pretty much learned yesterday. In the next century if the PPM of CO2 doubles or triples we'll get around 1 degree of warming from CO2 and maybe up to 7 degrees based on positive feedback? Does that multiple which doesn’t seem to be tracking sound right? Well if it is so what. Taking a long view of the planet's temperature that is not that much. Maybe a few scientists say the IPCC numbers are too conservative but I'd imagine that is a minority position. As I understand it we are undershooting the 95 percent confidence interval for the low end of the IPCC projections to date. If you have some sources to share do so. I tried to find some dire predictions yesterday but it seems like the bulk of people are critical of the IPCC which is plausibly exaggerating the threat and they'd have to be downplaying it quite a bit for me to be concerned.

Humans were able to adapt to every ecological niche thousands of years ago. That was during the technological Stone Age. We can certainly adapt now to a change that is relatively small. (I guess I won't use the word trivial.) If the world were heating up naturally would anyone be concerned or would we just adapt? Hell we might even be happy about this if it were natural. The whole disrupting the balance narrative makes something out of nothing. Through history the planet has been more lush with life when it has been warmer.

Max seems to at least be arguing for the point that the science should be taken at face value even though a ton of funding has come out of this threat and if anything they would have to be exaggerating. Even he says we should do nothing. How big of a threat is this really and why is the IPCC hiding it?

One other point, there really wont be any appreciable change in the next 20 years based on reasonable projections and based on current trends we will be on solar power by then so I'll be pretty surprised if global warming affects us at all but thats just my personal opinion.

You'd be wrong. I was asking out of curiosity...

I don't really see it as a good question. No proponent of climate modeling has ever claimed that they are unfalsifiable so it makes the comparison to austrian economics tenuous at best. I think it was meant just to show an inconsistency in boros position which is largely irrelevant to what we are talking about.

Do you mean that no OPPONENT of modeling has claimed they are unfalsifiable? If not then I dont quite get what you are saying.

My sentence was somewhat confusing. I don't think this is any real dispute amongst anybody (detractors or supporters) if models are in principal falsifiable. In austrian ecnomics that is a real dispute, even amongst people that look upon it favorably. I think the subjects are too different to be any value to compare.

WHy doesn't someone just answer Boro's question. I would think comparing the IPCC projections to recorded world temperatures would be an easy matter.

The question didn't really make sense. I would need to be asked a more specific question about an individual result. What it would take for me to falsify the concept of modeling is far greater than what would convince me a particular result is likely wrong given we are trying to model global climate.

EDIT: I should probably say that "global warming" isn't really an individual result imo.

Yeah, thats what I thought you meant. Ok, thats fine. I was being a little generous when I said it was a "good question" but since I've made a dozen posts or so in the last couple days criticizing you, among others, of treating everything as a "protected 'us' group who is unquestionable" vs. "evil 'them' group who is not only self-evidently wrong but not worth even considering," I figured I had better say something when it seemed like mjkidd was jumping in to defend Boro incorrectly.

This is a fair question.

First, I assume you mean wrt global mean surface temperatures.

Since most projections of temperatures are ensemble means that cancel out weather variability, you need to have a significant amount of time for the climate signal to emerge from the noise. Unfortunately that means looking at long time scales--15 years or so, but more would be better.

So a long term trend of about 0.0 deg C/decade would do it. Given that models predict ~0.2 deg C/decade-- would, say, a 0.17 deg C/decade trend falsify? 0.15? 0.12? I don't know exactly where the line should be drawn.

Thanks.

It certainly seems damning to a degree then. I have not investigated MMGW and don't care to do so. If I get appointed MMGW czar out of the blue then I shall check it out; until then I just see it as something that is or is not happening and there's nothing I personally can do about it in that I am not planning to study climatology any day soon. I still have no position even after reading this thread and some links but lol @ them either way. I hope they get dragged through the mud.

*looks at above "fact"*

*looks at last ten years on the chart*

*looks again*

*sighs*

Calling people's beliefs, no matter how ridiculous they seem to you, a "joke" is a joke and shows a complete lack of understanding of the very basic fundamentals of science.

Lol..... are you really saying that nobody who understands the "very basic fundamentals of science" will call astrology a joke? I think you might be confusing etiquette and being polite with science

Sorry but my fact has been supported by various climatologists. Read the article. Thanks.

The point of my post was the exact opposite of your interpretation. The graph in that post shows lots of warming for the last century, but no warming for the past 10 years.

Looks like small sample to me.



Call it variance?

No, nothing to do with etiquette. Believing that someone's beliefs are "a joke" is very, very unscientific and is indicative of a person that has a faith based approach to science. In fact, let me state that sentence again differently to make it a little clearer.

Believing that someone's beliefs are "a joke" is very, very unscientific.

Most of your argument here is along the lines of "hey, I understand science and you should trust me when I tell you that these other people talking about science know what they're talking about", but the very basis of science is minimizing one's assumptions, and calling people's beliefs "a joke" makes it pretty clear that you are making all manner of assumptions about those beliefs. So I say, where's your evidence? I will agree with you that creationism (at least in the 6,000 year form) and astrology seem very silly on face value, but without very strong evidence against them, evidence that humanity is not even capable of aquiring at this time, no one with a truly scientific mind could reasonably call them a joke.