[quote=ucodegen][quote=phaster]
WRT the matter @ hand,… California public pension recipients and politicians blame the markets and wall street bankers to rally the faithful. The scapegoating strategy mostly works! By beating up on other institutions this keeps supporters (and the general public) from focusing too closely on fact that politicians and public employee union officials created the financial problem.
FYI the same week the “pension” op-ed was in the paper, another math related story was in the news.
[quote]
Scripps Study (There’s A Chance Climate Change Can Wipe Out Humans By 2050)
As I see things, the op-ed illustrates an entitlement mentality that politicians and public employee union officials have about pensions. The root cause being the DELUSION they have, which is the math will somehow work!
[/quote]
That is a strange ‘pivot’. The problem is that math is ACTUALLY showing the AGW people wrong, and I don’t see any math in your references… but the AGW proponents don’t want to see the math, so they keep shouting that there is a consensus. Science does not use consensus – but politicians do.
Here is a little exercise WRT AGW. Build a table – MS eXcel helps. Down the left side – top 3 global warming gasses, downward strongest to weakest. Across the top, name of gas, chemical formula, atomic weight, relative global warming strength when compared to weakest of the 3, PPM on average (some of the gasses are highly variable) and finally weighted PPM using weakest gas as a basis. Fill in the table and take a look at the results.
The AGW proponents bring up that Roger Revelle showed that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, what they fail to mention is his warning about jumping to conclusions on CO2.
PS: I graduated from Revelle College, UCSD, I have met and talked with Roger Revelle a long time ago and I used to work at SIO a long time ago.
PPS: You can cheat and look the answers and numbers up when filling in the table.[/quote]
funny you mentioned revelle @ UCSD, he taught an undergrad seminar/thesis class that I took a year before he died
the class was offered/designed to expose undergrads on the science track (i.e. physics) to have an understanding of the policy side (i.e. political science) AND VICE VERSA
I was a undergrad double major, so figured (back then) it would be kinda neat to have the guy who started UCSD as an instructor to get his take on the two different POV
anyway during a discussion revelle mentioned the big unknown [AT THE TIME] was aerosols (i.e. water vapor AKA “clouds”) which varied albedo/reflectivity,… that in turn has an influence on the environment (i.e. temperature),… I also learned back then, math models are NOT perfect (i.e. always a work in progress)
some years after the class, read about the concept of “global dimming” matter of fact the same guy (Ramanathan) who wrote the recent scripps report (mentioned in the news)
when I mentioned “math” I was pondering the topic of “risk” w/ in the system (i.e. various knock on effects)
FWIW that is how I also approach “investing”
basically WRT the way public pension portfolios are managed and the way the scripps report presented itself, I see trouble ahead because I question the “margin of safety”
in other words there are huge downside consequence of mis-managing public pension portfolios (like wise w/ climate change),… as I see things various short term “gain” payoff(s) (for a select few) are an over all loser gamble (WRT “punishments”) in the long run
