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Reducing Climate Change Uncertainty By Figuring Out Clouds

Posted by Soulskill on from the look-an-article-about-actual-clouds dept.

Most climate scientists agree that the Earth's climate is getting warmer, but models predicting the severity of the temperature rise span a (relatively) broad range. One big reason for this is the difficulty in modeling things like cloud cover and how different air masses mix and move around each other. "Specifically, they have differences in how water-rich air at the bottom of the atmosphere gets mixed with the layers immediately above it. In some cases, this mixing increases rapidly as the temperature rises, effectively drying out the lower atmosphere and suppressing cloud formation there. This in turn would enhance the warming effect. In others, the increase in mixing is more gradual, limiting the impact of warming on clouds. The former produces a higher climate sensitivity; the latter a lower one. ... So, the authors turned to the atmosphere, using data to determine the relative importance of these processes (abstract). In the end, they find that the models that dry out the lower atmosphere more quickly are likely to get the process right. And, in these models, the mixing increases the drying rate in the lower atmosphere by about five to seven percent for each Kelvin the Earth's temperature increases. In contrast, the rate of evaporation, which adds moisture to the lower atmosphere, only increases by two percent for each Kelvin. Thus, the lower atmosphere dries out, cloud formation there is suppressed, and the planet warms even further. How much more will it warm? Quite a bit."

38 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. meta stable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As a physicist I do not take modeling of the atmosphere as we understood it now serious.

    The atmosphere is too much a chaotic system with many (meta-) stable states.

    1. Re:meta stable by gargleblast · · Score: 2

      As a physicist blithely dismissing another scientific discipline, you're a lousy physicist.

    2. Re:meta stable by sg_oneill · · Score: 2

      So is quantum physics, but that hasn't stopped a century of physicists from using statistical methods to work around the giant clusterfuck that lurks below the planck length.

      I had this exact same thing told to me by an undergrad physicist, so I pointed him at my sister who's a post-doc climate researcher and promptly schooled the guy on how its done (And pointed out to him why his knowledge of fluid dynamics was sorely lacking). He's not a skeptic anymore.

      For a less confrontational approach, go into your library (I'm going to take a guess and say your undergrad at best) and actually read some of the research, then come back with an informed opinion. Thanks!

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
  2. Insane Cloud Posse by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Funny

    Fucking Clouds, How Do They Work?

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    1. Re:Insane Cloud Posse by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2

      They form unexpectatly. They rain down suddenly.
      So it is here when you look at it, and suddenly it's gone.

      They insulate. They also reflect.
      So which effect is bigger?

      While forming they are simply water vapour (a potent greenhouse gas).

      While forming they extract a great deal of heat out of the ocean. How much exactly depends on many factors, e.g. do they form over night or durin day time.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  3. Models vs models by cirby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The study assumes that the models that show lower amounts of warming are the "less accurate" ones, and the models with higher warming are going to be "more accurate." Eventually, that is.

    The problem is that all of the climate models that predict AGW have been wrong, and the ones that show the least amount of actual warming are the ones that are least wrong at this point. So their solution is to come up with yet another one-dimensional computer model that shifts the possible warming a few decades into the future.

    The study also suggests that the water vapor in the lower atmosphere will more or less migrate up - which is not happening, according to actual observations by satellites.

    It's like the old AGW models, which predicted a "tropical hot spot" a few miles up that would happen due to AGW - and which never appeared.

    1. Re:Models vs models by flaming+error · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "The study assumes"
      No, the study concludes.

      This political debate waged in selective pseudo-scientific microquibbles is silly. It's really pretty simple.

      1) You can trust the process and presume that if the research scientists are converging on the basics, they're probably on the right track.

      2) You can prove them wrong - on scientific turf, not the comments section of a news article - and earn yourself a nobel prize and the undying thanks of millions of concerned citizens

      3) You can shut the fuck up.

    2. Re:Models vs models by Immerman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What are you talking about? Neglecting transient fluctuations (which are admittedly large enough to partially mask the still-small trend), global warming has been drastically worse that the worst-case scenarios predicted several decades ago predicted, probably in large part because human fossil fuel consumption has also been exceeding the worst-case scenario assumptions. Just because we haven't yet reached the predicted "apocalypse" doesn't mean we can't see it coming - it was never predicted to start to really manifest obviously until well into this century, and the earliest.

      Don't make the mistake of confusing the well-established "broad overview" science with the often disproved theories on the details that may exacerbate or moderate the problem. Trends are far easier to predict - you can fairly accurately predict how a crowd will move using extremely simple models that can't even begin to predict the movements of an individual within that crowd.

      At this point nobody in the scientific community is predicting global warming - you don't predict it's going to start raining when you're already getting wet. The evidence is in, GW is real and getting rapidly worse. What's being studied now is the details that may lead to ways we can "cheat" our way out of the problem, or at least get a more detailed prediction of what's actually coming once things get so bad that the politicians are forced to give up their oil-industry funded blinders and deal with the crises surrounding them. Because if you can get even 5-10 years warning that a region is going to start experiencing massive flooding and drought then you have a chance to start building the necessary dams now, instead of waiting until your budget is stretched thin by dealing with crisis after seasonal crisis.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    3. Re:Models vs models by riverat1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      The study assumes that the models that show lower amounts of warming are the "less accurate" ones, and the models with higher warming are going to be "more accurate.

      The study "assumes" nothing of the sort. It compared the differences in the way different climate models handle water vapor and cloud formation and found the ones that dry out the lower atmosphere more quickly do a better job of modeling real world observations.

      As far as all climate models being wrong that probably has more to do with your misunderstanding of what climate models are designed to do than it does with the climate models themselves. As George Box said "All models are wrong but some are useful." Climate models are at best crude representations of the atmosphere, partly because it's impossible* at this point to model things on a small enough scale to capture everything, but they're still better than any other method we have.

      *Impossible because of limitations in computing horsepower. Current models use grid scales of around 100 km x 100 km x 1 km vertical x 30 minutes per step.

    4. Re:Models vs models by khallow · · Score: 2

      2) You can prove them wrong - on scientific turf, not the comments section of a news article - and earn yourself a nobel prize and the undying thanks of millions of concerned citizens

      The problem is that 2) requires time. With sufficiently massaged paleoclimate data you can conclude just about anything. But it takes decades to gather high quality satellite data to confirm or falsify the claims made.

    5. Re:Models vs models by khallow · · Score: 2, Insightful

      At this point nobody in the scientific community is predicting global warming - you don't predict it's going to start raining when you're already getting wet. The evidence is in, GW is real and getting rapidly worse.

      How many degrees per decade again? And why is that considered "getting rapidly worse"? Global warming denying is not the only anti-scientific belief system causing waves here. The catastrophic climate change people are another such problem.

    6. Re:Models vs models by citizenr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      2) You can prove them wrong

      Prove a negative? So far reality is proving them wrong.

      --
      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    7. Re:Models vs models by Bartles · · Score: 2

      The problem with models and predictions is that eventually you get to compare them to real world observations. They become accurate or inaccurate based on reality. If you want to enact social and economic change, you make sure your models predict catastrophe. You gobble up any funding provided to you, and use it to predict more catastrophe with more certainty. The problem is that reality will eventually intrude, and the game will be over.

      http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png

    8. Re:Models vs models by dpilot · · Score: 2

      As an attacking AC you don't deserve an answer, but I'll give you one. My daughter hasn't had to to a paper on AGW, but she had an interesting little thing happen to her master's thesis. She was using data by previous students, and some of it didn't look quite right. It's not that it didn't match her desired conclusions, it's that certain proportions didn't match what she knew as normal. So she went into the archives, pulled a sample of the original materials, and took the data herself. Whoever had taken the data on the original samples hadn't done it right, and hadn't checked themselves. She had to re-take the data on all of the samples, and ended up changing her conclusions to fit what she found from the data.

      AGW is a complex thing - there will be no one conclusive experiment that confirms or blows the whole thing. You nibble around at the pieces, confirming or denying, and real scientists accept real, confirmable conclusions. AGW is also a theory, and real scientists accepts that the theory will need modification to fit the facts.

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
    9. Re:Models vs models by sg_oneill · · Score: 2

      Which would be fine if people where "massaging the data". Fortunately theres no evidence of that.

      As my sister (A post-doc climate researcher) pointed out to me once , her profession is filled with tens of thousands of researchers desparately looking for that one piece of evidence that would show that the whole fields got it wrong and theres nothing to look for. Unfortunately in the century since scientists started worring about CO2 and infra-red, that evidence has failed to materialize.

      There is no conspiracy dude. Nobody is massaging anything. Its just science.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    10. Re:Models vs models by sg_oneill · · Score: 2

      By "look for" read "worry about". The first guy that comes up with evidence that global warming isn't happening is going to get a Nobel Prize. And since Fourier first demonstrated CO2's greenhouse effects in the 1800s (And promptly started the scientific community flipping out about the greenhouse effect and the industrial revolution), nothing has arisen to demonstrate that the physics is wrong. Unfortunately to get that Nobel prize it would require some pretty massive evidence that some unseen mechanism is stopping CO2 warming the atmosphere PLUS a mechanism to explain how all the thermometers and various other measurement tools are wrong. Honestly reason and occams razor would suggest that no such breakthrough is going to occur.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
  4. But I heard by Kohath · · Score: 4, Funny

    "the science is settled".

    How can there be any uncertainty when "the science is settled"?

    The science is settled: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9047642

    1. Re:But I heard by ChromaticDragon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Good Science tends to be rather aware of its limitations.

      Bad Science Journalism tends towards dogmatic assertions of absolutism just as much as many religious folk.

      "Error bars", "p-values", "uncertainty values/ranges" are the norm in Science, not the exception.

      Here you're juxtaposing two separate issues. First "the science is settled" appears to be a remark or jab at the idea that the overwhelming consensus among relevant Scientists and relevant peer-reviewed studies is that global average temps are increasing and that human activity has played a measurable, significant part of that. Second, the projections for how much temp increase by 2100 and 2200 are not exact at all. They're given as a range with a corresponding uncertainty. Supposedly, this latest study/model serves to narrow that range. It's just like the difference between someone telling you it will snow tomorrow and you'll get between 1 and 47 inches vs. another person saying between 4 to 5 inches. Both predictions are somewhat uncertain but one is less so.

    2. Re:But I heard by Immerman · · Score: 2

      If you drop a feather it will hit the ground. The science is settled on that. Predicting the exact path the feather will take, now that's a much more complicated challenge.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    3. Re:But I heard by Kohath · · Score: 4, Insightful

      People making irresponsible and extreme statements about climate need to be disavowed by scientists or the science itself will lose credibility with the public. To a large extent, it already has -- and deservedly so. Get it back by being honest and open and by staying away from politics. It's going to take a really long time.

      And, yeah, I understand uncertainty and error bars. When the actual, measured temperatures are outside the error bars, the models need to be declared to be incorrect. My understanding is that this should happen within the next few years for many models, if measured warming trends continue.

  5. Re:First thing they need to do by riverat1 · · Score: 2

    What makes you think they don't already do the calculations using the Kelvin scale and just convert to Celsius for reporting the results?

  6. Re:First thing they need to do by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is to change to using an absolute scale of temperature like Kelvin

    Not really... they could have said "degrees" and it would have held true for all parts of the world using Celsius (including scientists in the US). The Kelvin bit is just silly, as Kelvin just sets 0 at a different point along the same scale as Celsius (0 being no energy vs 0 being freezing point of water). When you're measuring the temperature delta, Kelvin vs Celsius is meaningless (373.15 - 273.15 = 100 - 0).

  7. Re:First thing they need to do by Trepidity · · Score: 2

    They're reporting differences in temperatures, in this case "climate sensitivity", the amount of temperature change predicted for a given change in some other quantity (such as atmospheric concentrations of CO2). When discussing temperature intervals, Kelvin and degrees Celsius are used interchangeably, because 1 K = 1 degree C. They only differ (by a fixed offset) when discussing specific temperatures, since they set the zero point in a different place.

    P.S. It's 2014 and I still can't type a degree symbol in a Slashdot comment. Here's the Unicode: . And here's the HTML entity: .

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  8. op all wrong by cinnamon+colbert · · Score: 3, Informative

    the abstract doesn't say they used data, it says they identified a math procedure that caused variation between the models

    so, what you have are a lot of complex computer models that vary in output; the authors show that about half the variation is due to cloud mixing
    however, we have no idea if the models are in fact accurate, other then Fig 1b of Fyfe etal, which suggests that the models are in fact NOT accurate, so it doesn't matter if you lower the variation between them.
    http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Climate%20model%20results/over%20estimate.pdf

    I would remind people of history: in the early 1800s, people realized that CO2 absorbs IR, and the late 1800s, they realized that humans were actually putting out enough CO2 to make a diff
    Then, around 1900, someone pointed out that the atmosphere is optically thick in the IR (if you could see the color "IR" it would be pitch black all the time), so an increase in CO2 shouldn't matter
    This *scientific consensus* lasted untill the 1950s, when people realized that it is emission from the outer atmosphere that matttrs....

    so, for 50 years, there was a consensus that CO2 human warming was hooey

  9. IPCC AGW predictions FAILED by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Graph shows 1990 IPCC predicitons with REALITY. There is a range of values predicted by the IPCC and the "settled consensus of climate scientitst" and then there is reality which isn't in the range they selected. They are WRONG, 100% WRONG. They made their predictions, gave a range, told everyone to stop debating, and were wrong, period.

    Go ahead back to your church of AGW and keep tithing and singing hymns or whatever else you do there. The rest of us used failed scientific predictions as PROOF they were wrong.

    Spin away at those facts. Attack me, attack the graph, pretend I didn't post this, whatever. The fact remains the IPCC FAILED no matter how you want to try and look at it.

    1. Re:IPCC AGW predictions FAILED by mbkennel · · Score: 2

      OK, what are the expected sizes of decadal-level fluctuations around those predictions?

      Furthermore. The measurements of surface which are prlotted are now known to have problems, in particular, underestimating the polar regions which have sparse data and more heating, and heat going into the deeper ocean. A number of peer-reviewed recent analyses and data has shown that the polar heating has been underestimated, as has the heat going to deeper ocean. There is no mystery or problem.

      There are zillions of predictions which have been validated.

    2. Re:IPCC AGW predictions FAILED by dr2chase · · Score: 2

      Don't know if you've ever compared the three amounts of energy, (1) solar energy incident on the earth in a year, (2) heat of fusion of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps (i.e., energy to melt them, assuming they are at 0C and frozen) and (3) the amount of energy required to heat the oceans by 1 degree C. The ratios are roughly 1 : 1.8 : 0.9. (My arithmetic: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/numbers-that-were-larger-than-i-had-imagined/ )

      For me, this was simultaneously stupefying, scary, and annoying. Scary because the thermal mass of the ocean is incomprehensibly large, which means that burps and blips in the South Pacific can overwhelm any minor atmospheric effects, and annoying because in any discussion with internet "experts", no matter how correct it might be to blame the ocean, neener-neener-Al-Gore-said-it-would-be-hot-by-now.

    3. Re:IPCC AGW predictions FAILED by Alioth · · Score: 3, Informative

      That graph is out of date:

      http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/2010-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/

      --
      Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
  10. Human Based Climate Change vs Climate Change Title by hackus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Stop Using Climate Change to disguise an argument about human based climate change.

    Nobody needs to argue that the climate changes.

    These globalists who want a revenue stream for world government employed on you, your kids via carbon taxes always use this stupid, really irritating title on this so called paid research of theirs on human climate change.

    Besides, I thought human based climate change was now a fact, and there wasn't any uncertainty?

    Meanwhile low temperature records world wide are in the lead 2 to 1 over heat record highs because the SUN has nothing to do with climate change.

    Globalist Climate Change Research = CRAP SCIENCE.

    -Hackus

    --
    Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
  11. Re:Kelvin the Earth? by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 3, Funny

    Who knew the Earth's name was Kelvin?

    Oh.

    It's all just a matter of degree....

  12. Re:Chemtrail are working by iggymanz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    we've just learned that there are huge reservoirs of unfrozen water under greenland ice sheet, and for the second year antarctic sea ice has reached a record high to the befuddlement of climate modelers (and a ship full of them is stuck in ice), and yet you make absurd statement as if we had completely accurate ice inventory.

    The models are failing, they didn't even account for the dominant greenhouse gas on earth, which is water and which is far too complicated to model with current technology. And linking to the stupid assertion #18 on RealClimate.org about water vapor, based on a single event in the 90s, is not going to prove anything other than that only pseudo-scientific arguments from the "climatologists" exist on the subject.

  13. "Paid" by cirby · · Score: 4, Informative

    Those "record breaking massive storms" were, overall, not much worse than average. A couple of large ones, but they got large mostly because there weren't that many medium-sized storms along their paths. Meanwhile, we didn't seeing much of anything in the Atlantic (record-breaking "dud"), and areas outside of that one patch of Pacific Ocean were pretty average.

    On the "paid" issue:
    You do realize that even the guy who wrote that study you mention says that the reporter who wrote the story pretty much lied their ass off, right?

    The short form: The actual study took any group that published anything at all that might, maybe, sorta could question AGW. Even one article or study. Then they took the entire budget of each organization and added it up. That's how they got that $900 million plus.

    The actual amount that could actually, sorta, maybe be tied to anti-AGW funded studies or articles? About enough to fund Greenpeace for week and a half. If you counted things like studies showing that people don't like paying extra taxes for green energy stuff that doesn't actually work.

    On the other hand, the "green" businesses are funding all sorts of sketchy "science" to support their industries. Like the guy who makes money off of "carbon remediation," who funded the really stupid "expedition"/tourism group that's currently being evacuated from their ice-trapped Russian ship.

  14. Re:Human Based Climate Change vs Climate Change Ti by BoRegardless · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sorry, but the Sun has everything to do with climate change when combined with the variable orbit geometry of the Earth around the Sun.

    We will reenter the next ice age and Canada will again get covered by a kilometer or two of ice and all existing shipping harbors will become dry land.

    It will probably take another 50,000 years, but it will happen on the 110,000 year cycle that has repeated at least a couple dozen times now.

  15. Re:Chemtrail are working by mbkennel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The models are failing, they didn't even account for the dominant greenhouse gas on earth, which is water and which is far too complicated to model with current technology. "

    The shameless ignorance is strong with this one.

    Do you really believe that climatologists have IGNORED water for 50 years? Oh, "oops we forgot it again"? WTF? It's like asserting that the entire profession of internal medicine forgetting that kidneys exist because they're "too complicated to model" and assume animals are all kidney and urine free.

    The very paper from the original article, peer reviewed and published in the top journal on the planet, is exactly about this very problem of testing which of the many climate models best deal with the complex feedback and feedforwards with water and clouds by using experimental data.

    Here's a hint. The people who do this for a living know much much much much more than you and I do about it. I have a modest idea how much more the pros know about it (I have a PhD in physics and am acquainted with the author) and I also have the feeling that in fact however much more I think they understand, they are probably even beyond that.

  16. Denialist Trolls by Daishiman · · Score: 3, Informative

    Holy crap since when did /. get overrun by denialist trolls that just don't read articles, and obviously fail to even read the IPCC reports?

  17. Re:There is no uncertainty by bunratty · · Score: 3, Informative

    Shaky grounds? Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases cause warming. We are emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year into the atmosphere. The warming caused by these emissions was predicted over 100 years ago. We are now observing that predicted warming. Which one of these is the least bit shaky?

    I don't understand what you mean about no uncertainty. There is always some uncertainty in science. No measurement is ever exact, and science never proves anything beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  18. Re:Human Based Climate Change vs Climate Change Ti by bunratty · · Score: 2

    No one is claiming that we should do something that kills people to combat warming. We should use energy more efficiently and get energy from sources other than burning fossil fuels (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels) to cut carbon dioxide emissions. We can do that and also support more people on the planet.

    I think misconceptions about what we plan to do to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions is the reason most people don't agree with cutting emissions... they think it means that they will have to do without or with less. We can have just as much energy or even more while still cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  19. Re:Chemtrail are working by next_ghost · · Score: 2

    nevertheless, it is by far the dominant greenhouse gas on this world.

    Dominant in the sense that it has the biggest total impact. However, because water stays in vapor form only for a few days (9 days on average), that huge impact serves as nothing more than a mere amplifier of other influences. CO2 on the other hand stays in the atmosphere for centuries before it gets removed through natural processes.