MasterResource

How are uncertainty bounds communicated in complex, compounding simulation models?

Poorly to not at all.

Climate models have been diverging over time. As details are added (e.g. to try and handle clouds) the different teams making models get different results, and the gap between those results has been widening. We are told the science is certain but the reality is the science has got less certain. Journalists don't like to cover this because they see themselves as change agents, and discussing the actual levels of uncertainty would discourage change. This article in WIRED is an interesting exception, maybe it means something.

The gap between models is compounded by another problem. The individual models are often very buggy and suffer severe numerical instability. Even when told to assume no CO2 emissions at all, for which they are programmed to assume a steady state, they often end up predicting a massive ice age or that Earth becomes as hot as Venus. These runs are simply discarded and the issues are covered up.

Because these problems would cause ultra-wide CIs, climatologists prefer to just take an average and then present the predictions without accompanying measures of uncertainty. They also do this with the input data, for which there is also wide uncertainty.

They have little choice in the matter. Climatologists know their models aren't much good. Last year some of the most famous climatologists wrote an article in Nature warning scientists that there was a "hot…

I'm mostly just avoiding the tedious task of refactoring some load tests, haha.

Almost all solar power is heavily subsidized by the government, and is still more costly than its worth:

"In spite of government’s best efforts to encourage innovation by solar energy companies and encourage Americans to rely more heavily on solar electricity, solar power continues to be a losing proposition. American taxpayers spent an average of $39 billion a year over the past 5 years financing grants, subsidizing tax credits, guaranteeing loans, bailing out failed solar energy boondoggles and otherwise underwriting every idea under the sun to make solar energy cheaper and more popular. But none of it has worked. Solar energy remains prohibitively expensive – often three times more than electricity produced from natural gas or other sources. As a result, less than 1 percent of the electricity consumers by Americans comes from solar energy sources."[0]

Solar has a cost problem and an intermittency problem:
"At first glance, it looks like [photovoltaics (PV)] could be competitive with coal or natural gas plants if the PV cost were to drop below 10 cents/kWh. But there is an important difference between PV and the traditional technologies which makes this simple cost comparison invalid.

But first, take a look at the cost of electricity from a coal plant. The total cost is projected to be 9.5 cents/kWh per the [U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)] study. About 6.5 cents of this is…

Texas subsidized wind energy for 30 years now - it was actually George W Bush and Rick Perry's legacy making project when they were Governors of Texas [0][1][2] and made up 20-30% of total energy produced.

Issue is, a significant proportion of Texas's budget comes out of NatGas and Oil revenue, so there's a perverse incentive when renewables end up pricing well below NatGas and Oil, and labor unions aligned to ONG like the UAW, ILU, and affiliates of the AFL-CIO like the United Steelworkers are VERY politically powerful.

This will be a major hurdle in energy exporting countries like the US, Norway, Canada, Netherlands, the Gulf, etc and it can't be handwaved away.

And no - rETraInInG doesn't work when much of the renewable industry is heavily automated, a major reason the ILU, UAW, and parts of the AFL-CIO ended up supporting the Trump admin's tariffs regime: either you drop the unions and cause tens of thousands to lose high paying jobs and radicalize a vast swath of Americans OR you do nothing and let the earth cook.

[0] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/29/70295/george-w-bush-helped-make-texas-a-clean-energy-powerhouse/amp/

[1] - https://www.texastribune.org/2013/09/16/book-excerpt-go-get-smart-wind/

[2] - https://www.masterresource.org/texas/george-w-bush-wind-energy/

Alex Epstein is the director of the Center for
Industrial Progress, an organization he founded
in 2011. Its mission is to "inspire Americans to
embrace industrial progress as a cultural ideal."
He is also a blogger at Master Resource, a "Free
Market Energy Blog," and a past fellow of the Ayn
Rand Institute, an organization that has received
funding from the Koch Foundations including at
least $50,000 between 2005 and 2010.

http://www.desmogblog.com/alex-epstein

Some of my favorite blog post titles of his:

* Coal is Clean: http://industrialprogress.com/2012/03/12/coal-is-clean/

* Keep Our "Addiction" to Oil, End Our Allergy to Self-Assertion: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr005=zvtlch4c22.app14b&page=NewsArticle&id=12743&news_iv_ctrl=2090

* Why We Should Love the Oil Companies: http://www.masterresource.org/2012/06/love-oil-companies-educate/ (I think this might be my favorite for its shades of Dr. Strangelove's subtitle)

Scientists overestimated climate change and frequently still do by their own telling.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2

Climate simulations: recognize the ‘hot model’ problem

Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’ and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence.

In recent studies, the “hot models” have even been shown to be ineffective at reproducing past temperatures, a common method used to test their reliability and accuracy. This has cast further doubt on the model democracy approach, whereby all models are given equal weighting when establishing future warming parameters.

(unpaywalled copy here https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-soft-criticism-from-the-mainstream/)

Ethanol subsidies.

https://www.masterresource.org/political-capitalism/adm-ethanol-subsidies-case-study/

> Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period.

> At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30….