The rise of Trump kind of made Scott Adams a little kooky. Actually it goes a little further back than that. He had posted some blogs that riled up the feminist blog movement and that was where he started to turn bitter. I honestly don’t remember what he posted exactly or whether the outrage was warranted or not. But he started down the Men’s rights path (a divorce probably didn’t help in that regard).
During the election he convinced himself that Trump was was some kind of Svengali Genius he termed a Master Persuader. Admittedly he said early Trump would win but he also said he would win big and overwhelmingly which of course he did not.
It was around that time when he started to say Twitter was stealthily censoring him and the real kookiness began…
I used to like his writing, his blog and his non fiction but while I still find his comic funny (I named it one of my current favorites in the Comic Strip thread), I find I have to separate the art from the artist.
That said, this week’s strip is bunk. The fact that the richest people and companies in the history of Humanity have convinced half the population that Climate Scientists are in it for the money and not the people who sell the oil for trillions of diollars makes me believe you really can buy anything.
I know, in 2007, but the crappy, shopworn, religious-tinged non-humor persisted until the last year or two. Unless he had five years of backlog strips, something else changed in the creative team around 2015.
It would not surprise me, the creator of Hocus Focus, the comic that challenged you to find 6 differences between 2 panels, was so prolific that after his death it was found that he had about 2 years worth of unpublished comics left, and reruns continue in some newspapers still. (And one should notice how minimalistic BC was, like Hocus Focus was) And I would think that before dying someone that had a mission like that one would leave instructions to his sons about what the comic should do.
Eventually the controversy would tell his progeny to move on and ignore the old curmudgeon.
His blog back in the 90s was pretty funny, and he seemed like a fairly nice, down-to-earth guy. However, his main rallying cry at the time was the fight against stupidity, or in his words, “induhviduals”: a group that appears to have since expanded beyond the makers of inane office policies to include everyone who doesn’t agree with him. I think his current state is the result of 20 years of steadily convincing himself he’s the smartest person in the room.
I thought it was a stupid cartoon, but are people’s opinions of climate change going to change due to the cartoon?
Keep investing in renewable energy until it becomes cost competitive with fossil fuels, and then the market will take over and make them ever-present. I know deeply conservative people in red counties within red states who have windmills on their farms because they make money off of it. Most think they know more about climate science than professors at MIT, but they still happily sign up to receive checks from the wind turbine companies.
This is the cartoon, for those who haven’t seen it. Yes, it’s stupid. It goes along fine until the last three panels, where it goes off the rails into lunatic fiction. No, no one “ignores climate models that look wrong”. On the contrary, important parameters like equilibrium climate sensitivity are partly determined by running ensembles of dozens of climate models that include outliers and then creating probability density functions like this, where the probability of any particular range of climate sensitivity values is defined by the area under the corresponding part of the curve.
As it turns out, models tend to have a sharp cutoff at the low end but some predict much higher sensitivities than others, hence the PDF is usually a highly positively skewed distribution. The data is corroborated with empirical evidence from paleoclimate records and projections from the modern instrumental record, and the most likely value is generally considered to be the median that divides the probability distribution from all the different models and observations into two equal areas – which is greater than the mode (peak), and can be seen to be around 3°C – an estimated most likely value for ECS that has remained unchanged for more than a decade despite increasingly numerous and more robust models.
That sort of ensemble averaging is pretty much the opposite of “ignoring models that look wrong”. Nor do economic models figure in the physical science, or much of anything else as far as I know, and economic discussions occur only in the context of mitigation, as for example in the IPCC Working Group 3 assessments only.
I found the whole strip to be full of non-sequiturs, the moment I read it. . Dilbert asked if it was reasonable to draw a questionable econonmic model from what may have been valid science, a d the guy then accused Dilbert of challenging the scientific foundation, missing the point that Dilbert questioned the effective economics, rather than the causative science. I thought maybe that was the point of the strip, which was a headscratcher.
Scott Adams definitely moved past merely ‘eccentric’ a while ago. He used to have a few odd beliefs and came down somewhere middle-right politically, but now he is a full on climate change denier and Trump apologist with some really strange beliefs that he doesn’t even realize are unusual. If you read his blog (linked to on the Dilbert page) you’ll see this.
Even there, historically speaking, the economists that complain about the economical models are not in the mainstream, in other words, most of the time the economical contrarians are also coming from [del]stink[/del] think tanks that tell our politicians to do nothing.
Many of the ones that do see a problem like William D. Nordhaus, who was a president of the American Economic Association, do see a big economical impact if nations decide to do nothing.
I did read some of his blog, which I didn’t want to link to because it was so maddeningly stupid. It certainly puts to rest any possible charitable interpretations of what this cartoon is supposed to mean – the guy is a flat-out climate change denier, as I said upthread. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that he drew the “climate scientist” to look uncannily like Michael Mann, the climatologist who created the first large-scale temperature reconstructions that showed the dramatic “hockey stick” shape of modern-era temperature trends.
Mann was of course vilified by the deniers because the graph was indeed dramatic, and they attacked his statistical methods and some of the temperature proxies he used. Yet independent analysis showed that the temperature curve looked much the same with or without the application of statistical techniques he used like principal component analysis and with or without the disputed proxies. And it looked much the same for the following simple reason: the world really is dramatically warming. The final irony is that Mann is primarily known for his outstanding empirical work in paleoclimatology; his expertise is reconstructing how the climate progressed over the past thousand years and beyond. In attacking Mann, the deniers have descended from attacking theoretical projections to attacking empirical evidence, not to mention that they’ve been making many of the attacks personal, including death threats.
I read about 1/5 of God’s Debris… Junk, and it stunk. His comics remain entertianing. Usually. But not so much as before as the social / technological conditions that made them funny have largely faded.
The current robot-themed strips are pretty pointless, a far cry from the biting satire of business stupidities that he used to write about. He’s either running out of material or, as already suggested, is getting senile.
It was helpful to see the actual strip. I have no idea what Adams thinks about climate change. Just looking at the strip it could possibly be about the pointy haired guy’s ability to pick a credible climate scientist. The overall message doesn’t seem quite like that, nor do I care what economic models have to say about climate, but I can see that it’s a controversial way of making whatever his point is. Comic strips aren’t a great source of scientific information, unfortunately it might be the only source that some people who incredibly are in great positions of power may rely on.
I don’t see how that specific strip makes him a full-blown denier.
In the third panel Dilbert asks “How do scientists know that?” which is a very good question.
In the sixth there’s a dig to the use of models with “we ignore the ones that look wrong to us”
In the seventh there’s a good (between-the-lines) question about how good economic models are for climate which is clearly stated in the eighth.
In order to be a “full-blown denier” you need to deny either that the temperature is increasing (which Dilbert doesn’t) or that humans have no part in the rise (whic, again, he doesn’t).
But, again, I’ve put myself through the ordeal of reading his asinine blogs (“I read 'em so you don’t have to!”) which makes it clear that he’s a full-blown denier, and makes the context of the cartoon clear. The worst possibly interpretation one could put on it – that climate models are no good because the ones that don’t agree with preconceived “beliefs” about AGW are just ignored, and the even crazier one that climate science is somehow based on discredited economic models – turns out to be the interpretation he is trying to convey, sadly. I refuse on principle to link to them to make them more accessible or increase their Google ranking.
And I presume you mean “the pointy haired boss’s inability to pick a credible climate scientist”. Since the PHB is invariably and consistently stupid and always does exactly the wrong thing, it’s telling that Adams portrays him as the one who brought in the climate scientist, and it’s also telling that Adams made him look exactly like Michael Mann, who is a renowned and highly respected climatologist, but the subject of scorn among deniers because his research (the reconstruction of lengthy temperature chronologies) is easily understood by the public and very impactful, which has made him quite famous in the popular culture.
I know it’s kind of silly to be microanalyzing a cartoon, but the annoying thing is what Scott Adams actually believes and is widely trying to publicize. One can only hope that it backfires as people associate it with his general eccentricities or senility or whatever the hell is afflicting him.
