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RickBradford
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Monday’s figures raise the total number of deaths and injuries during the first three days of Songkran to 110 killed and 1,099 injured from 1,090 accidents.
Figures like those mandate an immediate national lockdown, with permits granted on a case-by-case basis for limited inter-provincial travel.
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1 hour ago, ezzra said:The day the government will finally pull their finger out and take this Covid business seriously and take decisive and painful measures to eradicate this Covid thingy once and for all we all be hearing of it for many months if not years to come...
You will be hearing about "this Covid thingy" for years more in any case, partly because it is impossible to eradicate, just as it has proved impossible to eradicate colds and influenza viruses.
It will only fade out when political leaders realize that Covid has become part of the scenery and stop trying to micromanage it. Given how politicians love the power that an event like this grants them, you are looking at later (years) rather than sooner (months).
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The story has everything. A bit of glamour, a bit of sleaze, a whiff of corruption, and the chance for pecksniffs to feel morally superior to people of influence.
But, as is well-known, one of the earliest and biggest super-spreader events occurred at an Islamic religious event in Kuala Lumpur in Feb 2020, which essentially kicked off South-East Asia's pandemic. One of Thailand's earliest super-spreader events was a muay Thai event at Lumpini Stadium.
All you need is a crowded indoor venue, and you will see a virus spreading. It is irrelevant whether there are soap bubbles and whisky involved, or religious chanting.
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5 hours ago, ozimoron said:
Mann is not climate change. He is one person among tens of thousands who assert that it is real and is a problem.
That is the usual sleight of hand used by the Green/Left when one of their pet heroes gets busted. "Oh, he wasn't that important, just one of a multitude of like-minded thinkers." It is a gross mischaracterization of the situation, to be generous to you.
Mann was the face of climate change in the late 1990s. The cartoonish hockey stick was placed on the cover of the 1999 WMO climate report and the 2001 IPCC report, yet such was the desire for a dramatic image that the IPCC would probably have put anything from a camel to a banana on the front cover if it had been offered to them.
It soon became clear that they had been sold a pup, and the hockey stick was quietly disappeared for the next report. Remarkably, following the 2009 Climategate scandal, the unerringly Green/Left British newspaper The Guardian published a largely factual report on the series of events leading up to the IPCC's fateful decision to use the hockey stick graph.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/hockey-stick-graph-ipcc-report
It's quite a good read, showing how even back then, politics had become thoroughly entwined in science, but one thing it certainly does is explode the notion that Mann was just "one person among tens of thousands".
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2 hours ago, BritManToo said:
from your link .......
'Hockey Stick’ Discredited by Statisticians in 2003
In 2003 a Canadian study showed the “hockey stick” curve “is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.” When the data was corrected it showed a warm period in the 15th Century that exceeded the warmth of the 20th Century.
So, the graph was junk science. You could put baseball scores into Mann’s Climate Model and it would create the Hockey Stick.
But the big question then became: did Mann intentionally falsify his graph from motivation to make profit and/or cause harm (i.e. commit the five elements of criminal fraud)?
Mann refused to submit his data to the court, so they could not prove 'criminal fraud'.
Yes, Mann got his pants yanked down publicly in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The court threw out his case and awarded full legal costs to his opponent.
Yet, there are still members of the Green/Left who to this day defend "Piltdown" Mann and his work, a stance which falls under the head of defending the indefensible.
Dealing with the Green/Left is like conversing with the Millerites, or Harold Camping. They are so invested in their pet ideologies that they cannot consider updating their worldview in the light of new information, something which most humans, and even some birds, are capable of doing.
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1 minute ago, BritManToo said:
Tarot cards, crystal balls and Ouija board spring to mind.
And probably equally useful and just as accurate as the climate change alarmists computer modelling.
Yeah, but much cheaper.
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5 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:
Own your error or let it own you.
Gosh, how profound. Is that one of Gwynneth's?
The fact is, that all models by definition have to be set up with a knowledge of the past. That is, historical data. Which factors should we consider, and which should we ignore?
We can then update those models based on real-time data, using AI methods which we have specified.
But models do not - cannot - just emerge from thin air. That is absurd.
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1 minute ago, Chomper Higgot said:
There are plenty of mathematical models running on teal time data.
I assume you mean real time data. Apologies if I have misunderstood.
What were the parameters of the model when it started? Who set them? Who decided what variables of the data should be considered and which should be ignored?
Even with the most sophisticated AI learning tool, somebody has to set the start conditions, the parameters and interactions. Relying on these sort of models is fraught with pitfalls, the more so if we don't really know how they work. Essentially, we are pushing these models far further than their capability, and then relying on them. That is a bad mistake.
To many people, running models of the earth's climate without including cloud cover would seem to be a major flaw, but that's where we're at. They have just started working on it, and I wish them the best of luck. (note the clever pun with the word 'nebulous')
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/09/01/project-clouds-climate-modeling/
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13 minutes ago, ozimoron said:
No. Climate modelling is much more than using past data to predict the future. I don't agree that they have to "inevitably simplify". Quite the opposite, they inevitably become more complex. Assumptions are only cut out when they are proved wrong, as some are. Nor do I accept that they are crude, merely incomplete. Modelling takes supercomputing. Models are predictive. By definition they will never be 100% accurate. There is no other way to predict the future besides modelling. Challenging the validity of modelling because of this simple reality is wrong headed.
There's so much wrong with that that it's hard to know where to begin.
All models use past data to predict the future. That is the nature of a model. Otherwise what you are talking about is a guess.
All models simplify. Climate models, in particular, have to simplify, because of the limits of our knowledge. Not all models, even simple ones, are (successfully) predictive.
There are plenty of ways to predict the future without modelling. Seeing what has happened in the past is a good judge.
No more correspondence on this particular topic will be entertained.
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Just now, ozimoron said:
What you said was "Models can be made 100% correct in modelling the past"
What you are now saying is this:
Both statements are true.
In a simple situation with only a few variables, then you can construct a model which will model the past with an accuracy of 100%. That still may produce a predictive power of 0%. Most likely, it will do better than that.
In a massively complex, chaotic situation such as that as global climate, models inevitably have to simplify, to cut out certain variables which are deemed extraneous (in climate models, variables such as the sun and the clouds) to present a crude representation of climate which can approximate to the real world.
Those crude and incomplete models, which can only approximate to the past, are then used to predict the future and to inform policy worth trillions of dollars per year.
Do you begin to see the problem?
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1 minute ago, ozimoron said:Models, by definition do not apply to the past. That's called history. If you are referring to increased knowledge about the past, that's still not modelling.
They don't fail, they become more accurate over time. Governments rely on medelling for ALL of their expensive decisions, whether financial or infrastructure planning.
*sigh* Models (or medels, if you prefer it) are an attempt to encapsulate past experience into a computer program in order to gain an understanding of the factors involved, so that we can predict the future.
I can hardly believe I have to write this, but if there is no past data to work off, then there can be no model that you can create. Even if you can model the past data to an accuracy of 100% with your model, that says nothing about its value as a predictive tool. This is well understood in the modelling world.
Yes, "Governments rely on medelling [sic] for ALL of their expensive decisions". Is that supposed to be a recommendation? Do you think governments are doing a good job? Have you ever heard of the Imperial College Covid model, perhaps the most disastrous piece of botched prediction in recent history, climate predictions included.
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11 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:
The caveat was not ‘don’t blame us if it’s rubbish’.
If you had read as many scientific papers as I have, you would know that is what it amounted to.
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6 minutes ago, ozimoron said:
Can record temperatures in 9 of ten years not be serious?
Certainly.
Do you assume that temperature will inevitably continue to rise? It never has in the past.
Do you assume that warmer is necessarily worse? It never has been before.
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4 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:
Your objection to the climate change model was the caveat that excluded ‘social and political factors’ from which you disregard the whole model.
It speaks to a lack of the most basic understanding of what you are criticizing.
Quite wrong, as usual.
I was referring equally to the phrase "Moreover, our results should be understood as scenario-based simulations rather than predictions."
Computer models have a dreadful prediction record, and the authors, quite rightly, are acknowledging that. The model is a useful experiment, and I doubt that the authors intended for it to be any more than that. "Don't blame us if it's rubbish," is the caveat that the authors were giving.
Reuters, however, sniffing a climate agenda story, has run the thing without any semblance of balance or perspective.
I'm objecting to the story, not the model.
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1 minute ago, ozimoron said:
Nothing wrong with a counter argument. I've just never seen one in relation to climate change which offers any evidence that it's not real, other than pointing to uncertainties and vagaries in the evidence for climate change.
I think you may have joined the discussion rather late.
Nobody here is suggesting that climate change is not real, as far as I know. The discussion generally has moved on from there on to whether it is likely to be serious, and what might be the best steps to take.
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1 minute ago, ozimoron said:
If the met bureau says there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow and it doesn't rain, they were not wrong.
Perhaps, but I wouldn't be prepared to pay them for future advice, which is what the climate modellers demand.
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5 minutes ago, ozimoron said:
The fact that climate models can't accurately predict outcomes does not leave open the possibility that it is all fake.
Correct. But is also doesn't mean it is true, or anything we should rely on.
Yet Reuters is essentially presenting it as received wisdom, without providing a skerrick of counter-argument from people who may hold different views.
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3 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:
and inevitably population migrations.
Ah yes, the "climate refugees".
Let's not forget that the UN predicted 50 million climate refugees by the year 2010, then when the real total turned out to be zero, tried to disappear their prediction, but, lacking technical skill, left it in a cache for all to see.
Not to worry, though, the date has been redefined. Now it's 2050, according to the Organization for World Peace (good luck with that), and the number of "climate refugees" has risen to 1 billion.
I think that's a better estimate. Always put the date so far ahead as to be meaningless.
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3 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:
The subject of the thread my be a good place to find some hints.
Well, since the lead author of the report was the University of East Anglia, the home of the Climategate scandal, it may bring up some painful memories, but it's worth considering.
Still, the interminable computer models and simulations which underlie these reports are very tedious and unreliable and so models that build on models on top of other models are even worse.
At least the authors admit it.
"There are caveats. There are no scientifically credible quantitative estimates of how climate change will impact social and political factors, so these are excluded from our model (Oswald and Stern, 2019). Thus, our findings should be considered as conservative. Moreover, our results should be understood as scenario-based simulations rather than predictions. We do not comment on the relative probabilities of any given warming scenario playing out in practice."
In other words, don't blame us if the whole thing is rubbish.
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5 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:
More of the same same.
Thanks for your interest! Who shall I talk about next? Piltdown? Naomi Klein? Schellhuber? They're all equally amusing.
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I think I shall begin a Be Nice to Greta week. She may be an appalling nincompoop, and easily manipulated, but she's probably the only prominent person on the planet who believes that climate change is a problem that can and must be solved. She probably really does worry about planet Earth, and the people on it.
This is not the case with other prominent figures in the debate. Take the case of Naomi Oreskes, the elder partner in the Wailing Naomis, who got rich from a 2010 book called Merchants of Doubt about climate change.
Her work was so bad that even Tom Wigley, one of the perps in the Climategate scandal, was moved to write “Analyses like these by people who don't know the field are useless. A good example is Naomi Oreskes’ work.” When the Climategate people, who know all about low standards, can't take your output seriously, then it's time to go do something else, like tending bar.
A rather well-known figure in climate circles is one William M. Connolley, an indefatigable editor of Wikipedia pages to push the climate agenda. Even he drew the line at Oreskes, calling her work "silly" and "shoddy", and that he "eventually concluded that Oreskes was hopelessly wrong."
Not that this deterred Oreskes. Rather, as is common in Green/Left circles, the worse you are, the higher you fly, and she popped up in 2015 to write an introduction to the Pope's encyclical on global warming, with comments which likened climate change to a "Nazi atomic bomb" and other illuminating ideas, such as prosecuting climate change skeptics under racketeering laws.
And let's not get started on Michael "Piltdown" Mann, who got rich off his silly Hockey Stick. He could have shown the IPCC a croquet mallet and they would still have bought it ....
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On 3/26/2021 at 7:47 PM, Tropicalevo said:
Worst case scenario - you become HIV positive. There are a number of drugs out there that can control this now. No sweat.
Funny how an HIV infection is now "no sweat", but the threat of a Covid infection sends everyone into an unglued panic.....
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1 hour ago, Chomper Higgot said:
Tackling climate change is a benefit for humanity.
At last a point on which we can fundamentally disagree.
I would say that tackling climate change - the way it is being done now - is a benefit for insurance companies, banks, organized crime, make-work bureaucrats and an assortment of tawdry climate hustlers ranging from the Wailing Naomis (Oreskes & Klein) over to that ludicrous old buffoon Michael "Piltdown" Mann.
Benefit to them: huge. Benefit to humanity: zero, tending minus.
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2 hours ago, Chomper Higgot said:
You on the one hand criticize the sufficiency of current measures to address climate change while at the same time denigrate efforts and those who are making the effort to improve current measures.
You have nothing.
As usual, you have managed to miss the point with ridiculous ease. Please don't take up archery. Or darts.
The current measures to address climate change are insufficient to satisfy the radical climate zealots. They are more than enough for me.
It now amounts to about $1 billion per day p**sed away on feel-good climate fripperies, money which could actually be used to benefit humanity, if that were something the climate zealots cared about in any way.
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DDC discourages inter-provincial travel as Songkran comes to an end
in Thailand News
Posted
Oh, they knew all right.
But Thailand is a country - unlike the West - where the government still has a healthy fear of the populace.
If they had tried to ban Songkran travel at the last minute after promising for months that it could go ahead, almost nobody would have taken any notice. Never give an order unless you are fairly sure it will be obeyed.
The good news is, that despite all these scary pictures on TV of people in orange T-shirts marked "Must be isolated" being marched into field hospitals, the total death toll from Covid remains, according to the last figure I saw, at 97. That is, less than 2 days' carnage on the roads. Some crisis.