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Past Measurements May Have Missed Massive Ocean Warming
An anonymous reader writes "Previous estimates of global ocean warming have been significantly underestimated due to historically sparse temperature data from the Southern Ocean, new research has found. From the article: "Earth's oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the warming caused by greenhouse gases, researchers estimate, with the stored heat showing up as warmer seawater. But a new analysis suggests scientists may have underestimated the size of the heat sink in the upper ocean—which could have implications for researchers trying to understand the pace and scale of past warming."
I wonder what happens to all the heat that's being taken up by the oceans. Is any of it released - and if so, how? Evaporation and heat needed to melt polar ice come to mind as possibilities. Or is it going to stay there, forever warming the oceans, and the oceans increasing in temperature forever.
The next thing is of course the question of how it affects the deeper oceans. Are those layers also warmed up - for example thanks to ocean currents mixing the water of the world's oceans?
> nonono, the science is settled.
Science, by definition, is never settled. What's far more difficult is to bring a scientific attitude to the table if there is a political dog (or two) in the fight.
I'm on my phone. Can someone RTFA and tell me if this is good or bad news? TFS is unclear on the matter.
The basic science has been settled for a long time now, the Earth is warming. Models of the extra heat distribution may undergo changes though, as data accumulate and better models are developled.
Soon even the US will have to accept that this is really happening. Simply saying "God bless us" won't help us - only changing our way of living will.
So given that conventional atmosphere models have ignored this to date, if the oceans are storing 90% of the excess heat, why aren't the conventional models showing temperature rises 10 times as great as what is observed, say 5-10 deg C?
Either the summary or the article are slack in the extreme.
What a surprise: the 1.4×10^21 kg of the hydrosphere absorbs the heat of the 5×10^18 kg of the atmosphere, 3 orders of magnitude more water than air. Breaking news: the heat diffuses through the biggest mass.
The sky is falling! The atmosphere is collapsing! Hop the next vehicle to the Mars!
Yours,
Isa Laura
But the temperature on Mars is rising too! We are sooooooooooooooo screwed!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Yes, and other words will be ass-raped by political lobbyists as well.
Doesn't change the effect it has on the climate.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I still don't understand if this discovery is a good or a bad thing ... but can someone please explain to me how you can estimate that a value is more than 100% "too low"?
I would assume that you would measure heat absorbtion in BTU or Watts, or something that can't go negative (ie, not in degrees Farenheight, which is a temperature, not a measure of stored heat)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
But the temperature on Mars is rising too! We are sooooooooooooooo screwed!
Relax. Temperature may be rising but sea levels are remarkably stable.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The Earth warms, it cools, it warms, it cools.
Models will NEVER be accurate enough for any real predictions, causes or illustrations. Why? Because the input to the models will NEVER have enough, or even appropriate data. If we don't have the Oceans data, and we don't, as highlighted recently by the breakthrough in mapping, we couldn't even begin an approach to modeling the future. What else don't we have? Other criteria, bits of relevant information, which acts on other data, producing results unknown, which again makes up the whole. No, this modeling business could be done on ALL the worlds computers networked together and you'd still have shit. Simply, you don't have enough criteria to accurately say, one way or the other, let alone pinpoint anything.
I'd love to see the gravity models and the data on magnetic poles with compensation for shift. Yeah, thought so...
Leave predictions to gypsies, weathermen, stock brokers and sports pundits. All are on par with a flip of the coin even with all the data they crunch. Don't tell me how damn accurate science is predicting fuck about the Earth.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You outed yourself with your last sentence. The only place global cooling was discussed was in the media, not in the scientific literature. It also wasn't the 1980s or 1990s, but the 1970s, which also means you either have a terrible memory, or are regurgitating something you heard someone else say. So, to sum up, you just demonstrated that you:
1. Get your scientific information from the mass media
2. Have a terrible memory of this topic, or simply regurgitate what others say without checking.
Just one of those is enough to make people not listen to you, but you got both. Brilliant.
Enough already.
The Earth is warmer, probably.
We don't know for how much longer.
We don't know how much warmer.
We don't know how it's happening, mostly.
We don't know why it's happening.
That's climate in a nutshell. Do you want a _government_ ringing in new policies based on that? A government can't even get well understood problems under control ... like say, traffic, or urban development. And if you dare say, "Hey, traffic is hard to model!", well guess what, climate is harder.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Mod parent down. Seriously? Who modded this shit up.
Science is and always has been "news for nerds". Slash dot has never ever been solely a tech blog. It was always "things that Rob Malda found interesting", including tech, science, politics (mostly US since he is American) and a few other bits and bobs.
So can people please stop harking back to a history of slashdot that never existed? It's getting really tedious.
Oh and if you modded it up merely because it called global warming "FUD", kindly fuck off because you're a complete moron.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The temperature on Mars is going up too? Obviously we need to drive more environmentally sensitive rovers.
im so sick of the lying. both poles have jncreased 40% or more accordibg to daily mail
You win todays internet prize for most ironic forum post.
start using your brain people.
If you used your brain rather than blathering mindlessly about popular media reporting of a science topic, you wouldn't have made this post.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
im so sick of the lying
So why are you doing it? We just covered how wrong you are.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot is news for nerds.
Nerds don't care about global warming. They'll just turn the air conditioning up. If/when it ever happens.
I've had a lovely warm summer. I'm hoping for more long hot summers in the future.
Models will NEVER be accurate enough for any real predictions, causes or illustrations.
I heard that modern weather models have accuracy above 80%.
Good enough, IMO.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
The computer models immediately diverged from reality and haven't returned. As Richard Feynman said, "If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong."
This is very confusing. Did they find evidence that this is happening? Or did they find something that "MIGHT" "SUGGEST" that something has happened?
Because if the former... great. I love it when science figures something out.
If not... then while that is still good that they're looking into these things... it does literally nothing for the public debate about AGW. A "might" "suggest" gets us no where until that is refined into something more definite.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
My more humane side hopes you are being sarcastic.
My cynic side suspects you aren't, and isn't disappointed.
Ah yes.
"The Little Ice Age" myth.
Here you go, since you dont seen to know what youre talking about:
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Myth: The models arent accurate
Fact: The models are accurate.
"Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean."
"While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations."
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The Earth warms, it cools, it warms, it cools. Models will NEVER be accurate enough for any real predictions, causes or illustrations. Why? Because the input to the models will NEVER have enough, or even appropriate data. If we don't have the Oceans data, and we don't, as highlighted recently by the breakthrough in mapping, we couldn't even begin an approach to modeling the future. What else don't we have?
Yes, it's true it's not 100% accurate... but so are you saying we should give up trying? You can use that argument to vaporize all of the research & theoretical sciences. Yikes.
Really? The same models that predict that result in the weather man telling you its going to be a beautiful sunny day while it pours down rain?
Weather models are an absolute joke.
What?
Your weather forecasts are wrong every day? And in every conceivable way (Temperature, Cloud cover, Humidity, Rainfall, Windspeed, etc.)?
Honestly, that would be an achievement in itself!
Or, maybe, they get it right most of the time, but it's only the times they're wrong that stand out?
However, while I'm sure that both 'sides' in this debate are equally guilty of seeing what they want to see, that which confirms their observer bias, I'm not sure that ridiculing weather forecasts is a valid argument against the accuracy and predictive power (or lack thereof) of climate models.
And here goes the lying liar linking to another lying liar, again.
The only reason they're inexplicable, is because he's not a scientist.
The blog post refers only to land based sensors in the US, and the difference it causes is less than 0.02%, and it onyl affects a single data set for the US.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/G...
"Denialists jumped on the bandwagon in regards to this shift making many grandiose claims that it invalidates all of the data that proves this has been the hottest decade in recorded history. This is not the case; it only makes a tiny difference that does not change the decade averages or the global averages."
So.. once again: nothing you have stated is valid.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Uh...no. You do know that's not how it works right?
Apparently not, or you wouldnt have said somehting so stupid.
So let me educate you: THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.
What, you think scientists are out of work and have to go learn a new trade if they can't find anything to research, so they make stuff up?
JFC...how dumb are you?
http://arstechnica.com/science...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
As if we already know everything there is to know about the oceans, and he would be out of work if he didnt just make something up....
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Cognitive filter. Example: you.
You do know that your local man on Tv usually isnt an actual meteorologist? And what's on the teleprompter may or may not have been based on NOAA's official forecast. Weather modeling and forecasts are very good, boasting >95% accuracy over the first 3-4 days, with accuracy decreasing the further ahead you go.
"This claim is based more on an appeal to emotion than fact. The inference is that climate predictions, decades into the future, cannot be possibly right when the weather forecast for the next day has some uncertainty.
In spite of the claim in this myth, short term weather forecasts are highly accurate and have improved dramatically over the last three decades."
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Yep, let's stop all these science bullshit!
... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "mathematics" finds that there is a need for a new "mathematics study". How shocking...
... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "astrophysics" finds that there is a need for a new "astrophysics study". How shocking...
... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "healthcare" finds that there is a need for a new "medical study". How shocking...
... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "software" finds that there is a need for "writing a new software". How shocking...
Imagine that! Oh, btw:
Nothing you said is true.
Probably why you posted as AC.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The "models aren't 100% accurate therefore we shouldn't trust them until they are" argument is essentially the same as the ones the anti-vaxxers use: Vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore we shouldn't use them until they are 100% safe.
The fact is that the groups plan on never trusting climate models or vaccines because they realize that neither will never reach 100%. Even if we were able to improve climate models by leaps and bounds above the current ones (which themselves are pretty accurate), there would still be *some* uncertainty. We might get it to 99.999%, but there would still be that 0.001% that deniers would point to. Same with the anti-vax groups. If one person gets sick due to a vaccine (e.g compromised immune system & shouldn't have gotten the vaccine or allergy that wasn't known at the time) then this will be proof that vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore shouldn't be used. Never mind that a 99% safe vaccine is orders of magnitude more preferable than any of the vaccine preventable diseases.
Both arguments use the Perfect Solution Fallacy.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Just because your model predicted the outcome of something does not mean your model is accurate.
It must be. That nice poltician in Kentucky said so. He said:
As you [Energy & Environment Cabinet official] sit there in your chair with your data, we sit up here in ours with our data and our constituents and stuff behind us. I won’t get into the debate about climate change but I’ll simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There’s no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.
And of course it's a total concidence that he happens to own a company called Mohawk Energy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
No one claimed they are wrong every day, just that they aren't nearly 80% as the grandparent claimed. They seem to be wrong about 50% of the time (at least) here in Minnesota too. We are talking major, predicted sunny skies and got one of the worst storms of the summer with four inches of rain kind of wrong. And when I say wrong 50% of the time, I'm talking about major wrong. I'm not talking about "predicted 83 degrees but it ended up being 85" kind of wrong (in which case the models would approach 100% wrong). They are wrong in some more major way, such as predicted temp off five degrees or more, wind off by several mph, heavy rains when sun was predicted, snowfall either doesn't arrive or has way more inches than predicted, etc. I know that's anecdotal to you, but I'd have to see some very good data to concede that they are correct 80% of the time. My observations make me believe it's probably otherwise (although maybe other parts of the nation are more accurate and bring the average up).
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Not a chance. Bring some data before I will believe that accuracy rate. I don't even believe 95% is accurate for forecasting on the day of, let alone 3-4 days out, since our forecasts here in Minnesota have predicted sunny skies in the morning when I go to work, and we later get storms that drop four inches of rain. And I'm not using the "main on TV", but forecasts that are based on NOAA, which does have actual meteorologists working there. So again, bring data... I think your accuracy ratings are hugely inflated, especially for 3-4 days out.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Ever wondered what for the first super-computers were used?
Weather models.
Who are one of the longest-term buyers of the supercomputers?
National weather agencies.
Weather predictions are important (if not crucial) part of the modern agriculture. Without the modern agriculture, the large cities and metropolis wouldn't be able to exist.
The accuracy of the weather models is judged not simply over days or weeks. They are run continuously over years if not decades. Their accuracy is judged over very very long period of time.
The climate change added complexity to it, since the weather models right now are in flux and are not able predict the weather as good as before. IIRC over the past years, a couple dozen new models have been developed which account for the climate change, but they are still being evaluated.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
No. Out of 100 times they say there is a 10% chance of rain, it rains 10 times. Weather models are extraordinarily accurate. You're just clueless.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
You may be correct but your source reference is terrible.
The website you offer has few reference to papers.
The author does not seem to have any real academic background one Graham Wayne.
CV:"My name is Graham Wayne. I live in Devon, England and I spend as much of my time as I can writing, principally about the science and sociology of climate change. To make ends meet, I repair computers and teach people how to get the best out of them.
My background is a blend of work in the arts, engineering (audio, IT) and management. This broad spread of experiences lead to my becoming a full time business consultant, accredited by the (then) Department of Trade and Industry. Eventually, after spells in Germany and Canada in management roles, I accepted the position of CIO on the board of The Mastertronic Group of companies, my last full-time role, which I left in 2006."
http://gpwayne.wordpress.com/a...
And the author of the article he is attacking is someone with massive academic credentials in the sciences, one Freeman Dyson.
cv:"Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American[5][6] theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
So even if you are correct and I think you are your supporting documentation aka the links to that site are worthless.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There are NO American Tanks in Baghdad!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets-solar-system-intermediate.htm
Good article, all climate denialists should read this.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Viking wines were made from berries, not grapes. So significantly less warm than "vineyards" might imply.
Fact: The models are accurate.
I think what annoys me the most about climate alarmism is the false certainty such as conflating opinion with fact. The second most annoying thing is the lack of scientific grounds for the arguments made.
For example, the above two links in the parent post show considerable divergence between the models and reality (sea level and polar ice extent while substantially and suspiciously downplaying the temperature difference between model and reality). The "myth" is confirmed but the writer portrays it as affirmation of their desired conclusion.
Meanwhile the assertion that models fit past events is near irrelevant since that is data which is already known and it is expected that the models would have been adjusted in the first place to fit that data). For example, I can construct an interpolation of any temperature (or other numerical) data to perfect precision using an even degree polynomial of sufficiently high degree, yet it'll be completely irrelevant once I attempt any sort of extrapolation into the future (odds are good, about 50% I'd say, that it'll predict temperatures far below absolute zero by 2100).
We see this attitude in action in the current story. First, the story noted that these models don't actually predict past events when they're run backwards from a current state. Then someone rationalizes that it's because the observations are wrong, not the models. This not only runs counter to your empty assertion that the models predict the known past, but also is profoundly anti-scientific.
Here are two examples where the most FUD-inducing interpretations are used. The climate models are "too conservative" because they allegedly underplay sea level rise, but the corresponding inability of the models to predict temperature increase is not (though that means the models are exaggerating sensitivity of carbon dioxide temperature forcing, the most important of the unknowns in climate research.
Similarly, when models are shown to be out of whack with past observations (as they were with future observations), the interpretation is that the observations are wrong, not the models even though it is more likely to be the other way around.
This profound inability to admit error is why I don't trust current climate models or the doomsday predictions they spawn in the least. That's why I'm going to wait a few decades and see what happens. If it genuinely is as bad as claimed, then we'll see something by then.
What is the accuracy rate 3 weeks out?
Nope, and the fact you asked that means you really don't know what's going on.
No, 99% safe vaccine is not ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better that disease. It is not even better than disease itself. Will you get yourself vaccinated against AIDS if it has 1% of chance giving you AIDS in first place?
Vaccines are safe to 99.9999% or more. And you always have to put it into context. If Ebola will spread to billions, 99% safe vaccine might be acceptable. If AIDS is perfectly preventable in normal case, even 1:million safety might be not enough. But please be careful with 99% and 'orders of magnitude' in same sentence - there are not that many orders of magnitude in 1:100.
A paper published today in Nature Climate Change finds climate models have greatly exaggerated global warming over the past 20 years, noting the observed warming is "less than half" of the modeled warming.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot....
A new paper by prominent German climatologists Dr. Hans von Storch and Dr. Eduardo Zorita, et al, finds "that the continued [global] warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot....
I hope that we come up with a list of deniers so that future generations can blame the grandkids for the crimes of their families. It is only right that if their grandparents polluted more to get ahead or stopped progress on switching to clean technology/recycling/efficient transportation, that their descendants should be the first ones to face the costs associated with the problems that will be caused and the lack of resources caused by climate problems.
Are you paying for the wrongs of your ancestors on the whim of others?
Whatever it is, it's not very relevant in the global warming discussion, because climate != weather.
FWIW, the world's oceans have ~274 times the mass of the atmosphere (1.4e21 / 5.1e18). Meaning if 1 degree C of atmospheric warming all went into the ocean, the ocean would warm up .003 degree C. Sorry. I just don't buy that we can say that the oceans as a whole have warmed up by that amount with any degree of certainty. Assuming we could, this seems like good news as I don't think that the oceans warming by .003 is going to effect jack shit.
Thanks to the butterfly effect, it's been calculated if you had a measurement every cubic foot of temp, pressure, wind, and humidity, you could only predict weather about a month in advance. Which you couldn't because of the computer wimpiness.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Earth warms, it cools, it warms, it cools.
Right. It warms from the combination of solar irradiance and our planet's atmosphere, and it re-radiates that energy at a longer wavelength. Unless you invent new physics to transfer more heat away, or heretofore unobserved eccentricities in the Earth's orbit, or similarly unmeasured increases in solar radiation, then increasing the partial pressure of a greenhouse gas must lead to increased heat energy on Earth. That's the part that is simple, settled physics: how things radiate. See also conservation of energy, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, and the absorption spectrum of CO2.
Beyond that, neither of us knows enough to criticize climate models. You very obviously have no idea what they do or don't contain, or what that has to do with the predictive power. It's really irrelevant; you're focusing on the models because you're hoping to confuse them with the fundamental science. We're not working backwards from the models (or the temperature data) to draw conclusions about how CO2 behaves in the atmosphere. We can directly observe how CO2 behaves in the atmosphere. The science does not rely on the modelling, it's the other way around.
The argument that the Earth is somehow irreducibly complex is a religious one, and you'll pardon me if I don't subscribe to your Cult of Ignorance.
Yes, I think that's the point. People want to find ways make money in their field.
However, none of those other studies are proposing to cost consumers billions of dollars in higher energy prices.
I'm pretty sure it's pause explanation #1. The global temp hit a little pause. We wondered where all the extra heat was going. It turns out it was going into the oceans. Done in one.... This isn't new. We've known this for a while... This is simply that more of that has been occuring than we previously thought. Keep your snark.
I go hiking a lot. I check the weather forecast. it's usually right. I wouldn't trust it 10 days out, except as a vague guidline, but I'd trust it three days out. I do, regularly. I live in Oregon. It's important to have your raincoat here....
So no, weather models are NOT a joke. They're incredibly accurate for just about every use case I've ever used them for. The absolute joke must be you...
and there is no conclusive proof that cigarette smoking causes lung disease. No, really, there has never been an observation of a cell mutating after exposure to a puff of smoke. The evidence is only statistical. And yet... reasonable people can accept that the odds are that smoking is unhealthy, in spite of the lack of "hard" scientific proof. Proof of the kind that Climate Change Deniers seem to be demanding. Arctic ice that is 60% thinner than it was when our first nuclear sub crossed under it in the 60s, Old photos of curling (that obscure shuffle board type sport) on fjords that haven't frozen over in decades, the no longer needed fleet of ice breakers on our Great Lakes, fauna found further and further north every year, tree rings, ice cores, historical records...all prove...nothing...but still, reasonable people can conclude that there is a link between our draining of the carbon sinks, and greenhouse warming. It's really not a stretch is it?
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
im so sick of the lying. both poles have jncreased 40% or more accordibg to daily mail
Clearly it's absolutely true because you read it in the Daily Mail.
I stole this Sig
I'm pretty sure it was you that diverged from reality... The earth is getting warmer dude... The data is easy to see. It's really easy to see. You can look up satellite pics of ice coverage. A simple Wolfram Alpha search will tell you global mean temperatures, and show you the data sources so you can investigate them better.
How do you people keep insisting nothing is going on? The excuses keep changing. "It's not warming. Ok, it is, but it's solar! Ok, it's not solar, but it's not man made.... It's natural cycles! Ok, it's it's moving too fast for natural cycles, but it paused for the last few years! It's warmer, but it stopped, so it's not warming! Ok, so yeah, Arctic sea ice is dwindling, but antarctic is growing! Ok, sure, arctic is sea ice and antarctic is land ice, but.... It's scientists, just making a grab for lucrative grab for government money! Ok, so that money is shit and it's pretty obvious all the real money is in private industry, but..."
On and on you people go, changing your story. Diverging from reality, if you will.....
furthermore, it's quite obvious that several industries just don't want a drop in profits that would come with regulation. It's quite obvious they've spent a TON of money to muddy the conversation. My question is, in 30 years when we can look back on this, will you !@#$holes fess up that you were wrong the whole time? Will you admit that you all were duped and spent decades ignoring your betters? Will you finally shut up?
Don't worry, I know the answer....
Meanwhile the assertion that models fit past events is near irrelevant since that is data which is already known and it is expected that the models would have been adjusted in the first place to fit that data). For example, I can construct an interpolation of any temperature (or other numerical) data to perfect precision using an even degree polynomial of sufficiently high degree, yet it'll be completely irrelevant once I attempt any sort of extrapolation into the future (odds are good, about 50% I'd say, that it'll predict temperatures far below absolute zero by 2100).
Shockingly, scientists are aware of that issue, and have developed methods to test models against existing data. They do that by training on one chunk of the available data, and testing against another.
You're making two more mistakes in your analysis.
One, you complain that models that fit old data perfectly are wrong because all they do is fit data. Then you complain that the models don't fit the data perfectly - precisely because they don't just fit data. Which is it? You can't have it both ways.
Two, you think that we have direct measurements for everything. We don't. We'd like to, but we don't. And even the direct measurements we have need to be transformed into data that can be compared across measurements. All of that is subject to being wrong.
This profound inability to admit error is why I don't trust current climate models or the doomsday predictions they spawn in the least. That's why I'm going to wait a few decades and see what happens. If it genuinely is as bad as claimed, then we'll see something by then.
Unfortunately, that inability to admit error is only in your head. The models have been changed countless times over the last decades, and have gotten better in response. Lastly, if you wait a few decades, it'll be too late to head off any meaningful changes. As the joke goes: what if we'd make changes for a better planet when it's not necessary?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
And, Allison Grimes is "Pro Coal" ... at least for now, and for long enough to win an election. Stop pretending that only one side lies.
http://freebeacon.com/politics...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
argh.... Just... what do you think HAPPENS when you release a few million years of stored up carbon in a measly few hundred years as CO2. Just... think about it. It's not that hard... Fossil fuels are quite literally millions of years of stored CO2 from dead plants.... And you release it in this HUGE surge in just 200 years... We KNOW CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We know it prevents us from radiating heat back out into space. This is not disputed..
I need to stop arguing about this. I know the people that argue against global warming are morons or have an agenda... Why do I do this to myself?
Location is very important. Some places (like California's central valley) have such consistent weather features that you can predict tomorrow's weather with near 100% accuracy (most of the time, rain is preceded by a change in the wind direction; detecting that alone will give you 80% accuracy).
In other places, with interesting land/mountain/ocean configurations, a storm system can build up in a few hours, in almost a chaotic manner. In those places it's very tough to predict the rain.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So far they have been hugely more successful than the models made by the more skeptical scientists. The only thing is that there aren't any scientific counter-arguing models, or those models have not lived for long. The models can only get better with new data, and more precisely they are modeling a warming earth based on the anthropogenic energy input. If you think models fail miserably then they should be failing even more. But that's not happening. Besides at the moment the warming trend is well in the area the long term models have predicted.
It should be noted also that the so called skeptics only come about when there's a news release of the climate change science, but they never come up with original science by themselves. There's a reason for that however: the big climate conspiracy and censorship. No way it's about the quality of the counter-arguing papers. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.
Likely means they miscalculated all the past prediction models as well. It works BOTH ways. It's called an "equation".
If the heat sink really is bigger than they thought, then Global Warming must have decreased more,
because of remaining heat from the sink.
The global temperature stopped increasing over 18 years ago. A big heatsink will dampen the temperature changes slowly. So an even global temperature which is being warmed by the heat sink, means that the warming has to have decreased.
In other words: A big heat sink is a sign of global cooling, not warming. And the lack of people pointing out this rather obvious physical connection, is a sign that they are charlatans, or quite stupid. And yes, I am a real physicist, not a political appointee pretending to be one.
If you'd like to actually look at science papers instead of a crappy website, here's one in Nature that shows the models are inaccurate
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Unfortunately, he's right. The models are wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The stupidity (as apparently you missed the point) is in thinking that this is valuable news.
We've already seen this theory before posted here ... all this new posting does is show the self-interest of one person. There's no evidence here (for or against) global warming. It's just here to churn up the blatherings of the ignorant...
One knows this because one studies nonlinear chaotic systems (in systems with far simpler coupled DEs), learns about things like the Kolmogorov scale, turbulence, Lyupanov exponents, one monkeys about with solving nonlinear coupled ODEs with both adequate and inadequate integration stepsize. From this one learns that the climate models are arguably some 30 orders of magnitude shy of a spatiotemporal step that one might reasonably expect to be able to integrate over some significant time to get an actual solution.
This gap is bridged two ways. One of the two ways is to make pure assertions about the physics in between the Kolmogorov scale and the scale we can afford to integrate. For example, forget local dynamics of thunderstorms -- thunderstorms are phenomena that are basically invisible on a 100x100x1 km grid. Assume that one can use some sort of probability distribution of thunder-storminess in the dynamics and that this is adequate to describe all of the violent and rapid heat transport vertically and laterally in thunderstorms with sizes distributed on length scales of 2 to 10 km and with time scales of significant variation of a minute or longer (the time required to get out of your car and reach the house, of course). Do this repeatedly, with everything -- tornadoes (and other small scale velocity fields with nonzero curl) -- gone, replaced with and assertion regarding averages. Don't worry about the fact that none of these assertions can be formally derived and that we know perfectly well that we won't get the right answer for any other chaotic system studied by mankind (for example, try this for a simple damped driven rigid oscillator, replace the driving force with an average of almost any sort and see what happens) thus far if we do this, but don't forget to shout that the models are based on physics if anybody dares to point this out.
The other is even better. When the models are run, they are still nonlinear iterated maps, even if they are integrated with approximated dynamics and an enormous spatiotemporal step, so they still exhibit chaos and make lots of nifty patterns that "look like" weather (and even are a theoreticaly and empirically defensible approximation to weather, for integration periods of a week or so from reasonable well-known initial conditions before the chaotic trajectories diverge to fill phase space and render them worthless for weather prediction any more). One gets, from even tiny perturbations of the initial conditions and/or physical parameters, butterfly-effect divergences that create an entire bundle of "possible microtrajectories" for the model system being solved which is, note well, not even arguably the actual equation of motion for the coupled Earth-Sun-Atmosphere-Ocean system, it is a pure toy model that nobody sane would expect to actually work. And of course it empirically does not work, not even close. The microtrajectories produced, which generally only work across a reference period (trial data) by carefully choosing large, cancelling forcing terms in the approximated dynamics, end up having far too much variance (compare to the actual climate), the wrong autocorrelation spectrum (direct evidence of the wrong physics but who is counting), and range from (for CMIP5 models) a handful that actually cool over very long time scales to some that go sky high.
The actual Earth, of course, only has one trajectory and it doesn't look anything like any of these model trajectories. So now comes the best part. The "ensemble" of microtrajectories is actually averaged and used as a prediction for the trajectory.
Words fail me. Again to fall back on a trivial example, imagine taking a damped driven rigid rod oscillator operating in the chaotic regime, starting it from an "ensemble" of slightly perturbed different initial conditions, integrating it on so coarse a timestep that one gets chaos but perhaps chaos that is not even qualitatively similar to the chaos observed with an adequate timestep, and then
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
Then why are you asking questions on /.?
I don't think the people here at /. are doing such a bad job explaining climate science, but you can always ask your money back and go find answers from real climate scientists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
Change in ocean currents.
What?
Your weather forecasts are wrong every day?
Pretty often, yes. I mean, take a look at the weather report today for the predicted weather on Thursday. Screenshot it on your spiffy phone, and compare it to a screenshot three days from now. If you live on the coasts or the northern US or Canada, then three days is all it takes for the Meteorologist to be wrong--sometimes fewer.
Go to weather.com or accuweather.com and check the hourly forecast. For me, it is almost always spot on. Forecast for tomorrow? I'd say accuracy is much better than 80%. Forecast further out than that? Usually pretty good, again seems better than 80% accurate from what I can tell.
Not sure what year you are living in that weather forecasts are still so poor.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
It is completely normal that conclusions lead us to doubt our observations and do new measurements. Observations can be misleading unless we have a proper theory with appropriate measurements.
As for the current problem: Computer models are not reality, but - apart from data from the past - they are the best we have.
Science works like this:
First you observe something.
Then you try to come up with an explanation. That explanation needs to make some predictions (or it would be useless).
Then you test those predictions. Usually by making experiments.
Now, here we have a problem. We don't have a second earth to experiment with. And even if we had, the timescales involved are too large to make experiments in real-time.
So instead we use climate models. But these models are not reality. These are models we come up with on our own. How do we do that? Well, people that are generally learned about the subject try to think about anything that could possibly affect the climate. They then create a mathematical model and see if it's predictions fit the known data (i.e. data from the past must predict the present). The better it does, the better the model.
Now it turns out that we have some wrong data. Obviously that wrong data will have lead to climate models that do not predict reality.
This means we have to alter our current climate models to fit the new data. Someone will have to come up with an idea what exactly is wrong with the models and how to fix them, of course. But that is no different from how the models were created in the first place.
It also does not mean the models are not useful. They are. As long as they accurately predict current climate from past data, we can assume that they will also predict *future* climate from *present* data.
But, yes, our predictions can at best be as accurate as our observations. And if we measure wrong, that is a problem.
Disclaimer: IANACS - I am not a climate scientist
[quote]In the Southern Ocean in particular, they estimate past heat tallies were 48% to 152% too low. Globally, past estimates could be as much as 25% off. [/quote]
So, article states there was a massive underestimation of measurements but you state that past models were accurate. Yet if they were accurate before then they are not now. Which is it? They were accurate before but not accurate anymore or they were inaccurate before and are accurate now?
Hint: They were never accurate.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
There are some really simple explanations for this: one, the ocean currents changed (due to changes in the atmospheric climate) forcing more of the warmer water deeper into the ocean than before, two, no one said it was an "all-at-once" thing, and even if they did their perspective on "all-at-once" may be decades where you may be thinking more immediately, three, no one said that the rise in air temperatures WASN'T heating the oceans all along. As a matter of fact the continuing rise in ocean temperature has always been a priority concern to climatologists because of the impact on the entire food chain.
Keep your snark.
If you're going to oppose overwhelming scientific consensus for political reasons, snark is a very important weapon.
Is this The Pause Explanation #51 or #52? Can't keep track anymore.
Why would you think that there can be only a single explanation of "The Pause" (really just a slowdown in atmospheric warming) rather than multiple things coming together to cause the effect?
I live in south Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico side. The weather reports are almost always right.
The summer is usually: "It's going to be warm and sunny this morning and early afternoon. The evening will see some rain as the saturated air inland cools off and moves toward the coast."
The winter is usually: "It's going to be warm and sunny."
Occasionally is is: "Hurricane!"
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
One thing is clear from all the data, and you can get the same data online as it is free access and abundant, there is a direct correlation between the rise in fossil fuel use starting with the Industrial Revolution (~1850) and the incremental rise in global average temperatures. Yes, I know, correlation and causation don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, but in this case there is a very strong indicator of cause and effect, beyond a (sane) reasonable doubt. The graph of the two data sets show linear consistency over time with very few outliers. This is why anyone who has actually taken the time to research climate change on their own has come to the conclusion that humans are changing the climate through our burning of fossil fuels. If you disagree you either have money involved in the fight, are burying your head in the sand and hoping it all goes away, or are completely out of touch with reality and need immediate psychiatric care.
And he just told us that the data that he does get from the NOAA is not reliable where he lives.
You've been knocked out.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Umm, did Vikings make wine? I thought they made mead, which comes from honey, not berries.
Dude, you're incoherent. Climate models start from one veeeeeeery simple fact: more heat is going in then going out. That's been measured by the satellite albedo measurements and can be directly quantified.
Then we have a direct causative agent - the rising amount of CO2. It's directly measured without any integration or even differentiation needed! So what do you say to that?
No need to invoke Lyapunov or Kolmogorov. Do you think you're the only one here who knows that ODEs are?
So it wasnt [sic] going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt [sic] the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
Considering that over 90% of the heat from global warming goes into the oceans in the first place and that the top 10 feet of ocean contain as much heat as the entire atmosphere it doesn't take much of a shift in heat absorption by the oceans to have a profound effect on atmospheric temperatures. Heat has always been going into the oceans, the distribution has just shifted a little lately.
Just because your model predicted the outcome of something does not mean your model is accurate.
Correct, but if the model predicts the outcome more than half the time, or up to ninety percent of the time, then it's pretty accurate. It may not be precise, but it is accurate.
That comment should be modded up to 1 million!
I heard that modern weather models have accuracy above 80%.
But weather is not climate, as we get reminded by Warmists every time there is a cold snap (they are mysteriously silent on this issue when there's a heat wave.)
Furthermore, predicting "the weather will be the same tomorrow as today" gets you about 70% accuracy (http://www.weatheranalytics.com/wa/weather-report-forecasts-improving-climate-gets-wilder/) so the increment to a shade over 80% at a cost of millions in hardware and enormous computational complexity is nothing to write home about.
Furthermore, this new report, if it withstands the test of time, is one more demonstration that anyone who says "the science is settled" is a political shill (likely for the far left: http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...)
Every few months we get an announcement of a new way in which climate models are wrong. For purely political reasons this is usually couched in terms of "worse" or "better" (usually worse, because that's what sells eyeballs) but to a scientist what matters is "correct" or "incorrect". The sign of the error is relatively uninteresting when evaluating the quality of the science.
And don't get me wrong: anthropogenic climate change is real and significant, and we should be aggressively pursuing changes. Carbon taxes, in particular, are an proven-effective policy that both reduce CO2 emissions and reduce income taxes and corporate taxes, so anyone who opposes them must be in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes.
And anyone who says both "ACC could result in the end of civilization" and "We should not be building new nuclear plants" is beyond evil. Nuclear power is a significant component of the climate change solution because it is the only generally-available, proven-effective replacement for base-load coal, and coal is a huge contributor to GHG emissions.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Tell you what. Given that the models are making predictions as to what the temperature rise will be 100 years from now, I'll believe your models if you can make a prediction using current models for 2 years from now.
Don't make that promise.
They just produce 50 models that start with today's temperature, and have the first keep steady for one month then increase, the second keep steady for two months, the third for three months, etc. All of them will have a multiple-degree increase by the year 2100.
So whichever one is 'accurate' in two years, they'll still swear it is the perfect model to rebuke you with.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
As someone that lives in Florida I can say that I find them no joke. The Hurricane models are pretty good for path. Strenght is getting better but still not as good. Of course if you are dumb and look at the line and not the cone that is your problem.
Back when I was a kid a very long time ago they really didn't work at all. Back 20 years ago they where not all that great to be honest. Today they are good enough to give you a solid 3 day warning for the cone.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, 99% safe vaccine is not ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better that disease. It is not even better than disease itself. Will you get yourself vaccinated against AIDS if it has 1% of chance giving you AIDS in first place?
Vaccines are safe to 99.9999% or more. And you always have to put it into context. If Ebola will spread to billions, 99% safe vaccine might be acceptable. If AIDS is perfectly preventable in normal case, even 1:million safety might be not enough. But please be careful with 99% and 'orders of magnitude' in same sentence - there are not that many orders of magnitude in 1:100.
Except we're talking about billions of people, not one hundred, so yes, orders of magnitude and percentages do apply in context. Nice try. And yes, if AIDS had become a pandemic like Ebola threatens to become I would definitely take a 1% chance of getting AIDS if it meant that I would not get AIDS at all should the vaccine work. The bottom line on that is if I didn't get the vaccine the odds of contracting the disease could be much higher than 1% of six billion (and change). Some of us do have the capacity to work with numbers larger than 100, and do floating point math on those numbers in our heads, i.e., we're over the age of 12 years.
Never mind that a 99% safe vaccine is orders of magnitude more preferable than any of the vaccine preventable diseases.
As abies says, you are full of it. But to add to Ebola and AIDS, what about other diseases we vaccinate against? Polio, whooping cough/pertussis, tetanus, diphtheria? What is the percentage of non-vaccinated people who get those, compared to your 1% unsafe vaccine?
Also, it isn't 99% safe versus getting the disease, it is really 1% chance you die or are permanently disabled from the vaccine. Afterall, the anti-vaxxers aren't saying the vaccines are not effective defense against the diseases, they claim profound injury or death from the material in the vaccine.
You are claiming models are in that realm.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
Yes. The scientists are saying that it never went into the oceans until they noticed that it was going into the oceans.....
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
This statement is dumb. Let's go to a more obvious example: if people who arent gravitational physicists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent gravitational physicists are also not qualified to defend the science...even though we can all see the apples falling from the tree. Or the ice melting from the Arctic.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the words "absolute joke" "rain instead of sun" were used.
that pretty much qaulifies.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
One, you complain that models that fit old data perfectly are wrong because all they do is fit data. Then you complain that the models don't fit the data perfectly - precisely because they don't just fit data.
I don't actually. I was pointing out first, that boasting a model fit known data was a red herring since it was easy to fit data without having extrapolation to the future. Second, that the story indicated that the models weren't even getting that right.
Two, you think that we have direct measurements for everything. We don't. We'd like to, but we don't. And even the direct measurements we have need to be transformed into data that can be compared across measurements. All of that is subject to being wrong.
I don't do this either. I merely point out that we have direct measurement of global mean temperature in the past few decades.
Lastly, if you wait a few decades, it'll be too late to head off any meaningful changes.
Where's the evidence for this urgency? This is just a FUD tactic. Nobody, including Europe is anywhere near being able to reduce their activities in a way that can meet the requirements of these "meaningful changes". And the consequences just aren't that dire. Adaptation is the option that is never discussed.
Not sure what you mean by few references...All these were on that page.
http://www.grida.no/publicatio...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncli...
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/...
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis...
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
As for Dyson...two imporat words you dont find in his biography are "climate scientist".
In fact, he rather quite well falls into the science trope of the phsycist who insits on talking about things outside his realm of expertise.
(There's even an XKCD for that, though I am missing the link atm)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You mean the article talking about the so-called pause? /. news item is even about ("Past Measurements Understated Ocean Warming" etc) ?
The one caused by the heat going into the oceans?
The thing this entire
The ocean absorbing heat that is now part of the models?
That article?
Try again buddy.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
No, the models always were accurate.
Its simply idiots like you that fail to understand or pay attention to timelines and logic.
Real world observations kept falling within the IPCC projections. The projections dont say "On Januray 1st 2015 it will be 20C." They give a range of outcomes. The IPCC projections gives 4 projections, ranging from very conservative at one extreme, to very not at the other. At no point did they actually fall outside those projections. From that standpoint alone the models were always accurate.
What was noticed though was the deviation between the projections (specifically the middle 2, the balanced projections) and the actual observations was increasing. Observations were trending more towards the more conservative projection, a projection considered unrealistic.
This is what let to the entire "pause" thing.
We knew the energy is being dumped into the planet.
We knew it wasn't leaving.
So the question was, where was it going?
Answer: Oceans.
And now the oceans, because of measurements like those in the /. submission, are being included and refined in the models as we get more data about how much heat they can abosrb, and how they react to it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Again with your false equivalence BS.
While only an idiot would run against coal in Kentucky...where is it a reseaonable assumption that she is lying?
She's from Kentucky. A large portion of Kentucky relies on coal. Is it really that big a stretch to think she supports coal?
And its fair to point out that nowhere in her support of coal does she include blatantly obvious "even a 4th grader wouldnt something so blatantly wrong" scientific statements along the lines of "we in acadamia all agree that the temperature on Mars is the same as here".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
You know, if you could engage your brain for 5 seconds instead of going to your default ideology routine, you may be able to figure this one out for yourself. The oceans are not static objects. Ocean currents can and do have periods that can span a couple decades. These currents can bring warmer or cooler waters to the surface.
Form there, it's basic physics. If the air is warmer than the water, the water heats up. If the air is colder than the water, the air heats up. If the net energy balance of the system is positive, then the water (having much greater heat storage capacity) will gradually warm up over time. As the currents cycle there will be periods where air temperatures will be cooler and periods where air temperatures will be warmer. And again, if the net energy balance is positive then temperatures will stair-step higher and higher (which is what we've been seeing).
~X~
It doesn't matter by how much you multiply it. Orders of magnitude do not care about size of numbers. If vaccine kills 10 million out of each 1 billion, then disease would need to kill at least hundreds of millions out of 1 billion to talk about _orders_ of magnitude better. Probably only Yersinia pestis is anywhere close to that, most of other vaccines prevent a lot less virulent diseases.
My point is not that vaccination is bad. My point is that 99% is absolutely not enough for vaccines and not going to be accepted unless we are in end-of-world pandemic scenario. And if vaccine would be 99% safe only, anti-vaccine groups would have a major point in raising concerns - which they don't, because vaccines are orders of magnitude (this time really _orders_) safer than 99%, which we probably cannot say about quality of AGW climate models. So comparing AGW denialism to anti-vaccine based on percentages is not really valid...
You're reading a lot into what I said. I'm willing to listen to actual science, not the personal opinions of scientists, not politics and not personal feelings. The computer models are wrong.
I think what annoys me the most about climate alarmism is the false certainty such as conflating opinion with fact. The second most annoying thing is the lack of scientific grounds for the arguments made.
"Alarmism" as you call it, is social. I've yet to read any scientific papers claiming we're all going to die.
As for your "lack of scientific grounds", that's just bullshit. The basic chemistry and thermodynamics were worked out well over a century ago. The first prediction of AGW was made by Arrhenius in 1899 (he also created the first climate model and is considered the father of modern chemistry). If you want to go further back you could talk a look at the preliminary work on greenhouse gas theory from Fourier (1825).
For example, the above two links in the parent post show considerable divergence between the models and reality (sea level and polar ice extent while substantially and suspiciously downplaying the temperature difference between model and reality). The "myth" is confirmed but the writer portrays it as affirmation of their desired conclusion.
Irrelevant. Those aren't scientific papers. They're not peer-reviewed. Any idiot on the web can say whatever they want. That doesn't make them a legitimate source of information.
Meanwhile the assertion that models fit past events is near irrelevant since that is data which is already known and it is expected that the models would have been adjusted in the first place to fit that data). For example, I can construct an interpolation of any temperature (or other numerical) data to perfect precision using an even degree polynomial of sufficiently high degree, yet it'll be completely irrelevant once I attempt any sort of extrapolation into the future (odds are good, about 50% I'd say, that it'll predict temperatures far below absolute zero by 2100).
Ignorance only hurts your argument. Climate models are physical simulations. They work based on physics, not some statistical curve fitting which is what you seem to be implying. Climate models are initialized with some historical set of conditions, and then run forward to see how well they model climate responses.
That's why physical models in general (fluid dynamic models, gravitational models, weather models, climate models, etc.) can be used for helping make useful decisions and research.
We see this attitude in action in the current story. First, the story noted that these models don't actually predict past events when they're run backwards from a current state. Then someone rationalizes that it's because the observations are wrong, not the models. This not only runs counter to your empty assertion that the models predict the known past, but also is profoundly anti-scientific.
You have terrible reading comprehension. The article (which isn't the paper) says the scientists used climate models to look into the past, not "run the models backwards". Running them backwards doesn't even make any sense. You can read the paper to see their methodology.
The issue the paper is addressing, which you fail to grasp, is that the the data from recent higher accuracy observations (namely the ARGO network) are reporting a lot more warmth than was previously estimated from earlier, lower quality observations. They then analyzed the discrepancies and discovered that global ocean heat in the upper 700m may have been off by as much as 25%, which would have potential impacts on things like CO2 sensitivity studies.
Here are two examples where the most FUD-inducing interpretations are used. The climate models are "too conservative" because they allegedly underplay sea level rise, but the corresponding inability of the models to predict temperature increase is not (though that means the models are exaggerating sensitivity of carbon dioxide temperature forcing, the most important of the unknowns in climate research.
You are viewing a c
~X~
There are vineyards in NH and upstate NY today. Not all grapes need warm weather. And not all wine made is "good" wine.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
The accuracy of models is not a binary condition. They were accurate in the past given the state of our knowledge. They are more accurate now because the state of our knowledge has improved. They will be more accurate in the future as we learn even more.
Generally, actually, yes, the model predicting outcomes does mean that the model is accurate. That is the purpose and evaluation of models.
If you disagree, please inform us what does mean that the model is accurate, or possibly assert that models are not judged as accurate.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
And that turns out to be insufficient. Weather, particularly clouds and storms, turns out to have a much larger effect than expected. That's why the most recent IPCC report has estimates and error ranges very similar to Arrhenius's original estimates despite that century of advances in climate research.
reading at least the summary sections would allow you to make much stronger arguments for your case.
The IPCC's "executive" summaries are notorious for pushing politics over science.
The observations weren't "wrong". Did you even bother reading anything? The ARGO observations are higher resolution and more accurate. Even allowing for that they noticed a considerable discrepancy between the ARGO observations and the previous observations. That's what they investigated.
I get that there's plenty of rationalizing on why the estimates were wrong. But as you say, that's not science. Data that shows your estimates were wrong is science.
Error analysis is a fundamental part of any research, and climate science is no exception. You'll see it in practically every paper. Science is confidence intervals, not absolutes. Saying otherwise demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge and experience about how science, any science, is actually done.
So what? Everyone does that. But plenty of people get it wrong anyway.
There are no doomsday scenarios in climate science. We can certainly make living on Earth a hell for ourselves if we don't smarten up, but not single legitimate scientific source I'm aware of is predicting the end of the world, or even human extinction. So stop with that nonsense. It simply isn't true.
Oh look, another doomsday prediction.
As far as the wait and see approach goes, I hear that always works out well especially when you're screwing around with climate system on the only planet we live on. By the time things are bad enough that even someone like you must face reality, it will be far too late to do anything about it. That's like getting a vaccination for polio after you're already paralyzed.
Well, that's what it will take. It is remarkable how people, even those in the climate research industry, can't show me actual evidence of dangerous climate change. It's all fluffy FUD about how we have to act now before it's too late.
Your facts are not what you claim.
Here's the projections from the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1991. You''ll find projections of future warming based on CO2 emissions remaining at 1990 levels by the best models suggested today would be warmer globally by 0.5C. More over, the scenarios with increased CO2 emissions that more closer match whats actually happened that predicted warming of over 0.5C by today. Actual measured warming though is sitting at about 0.2C warmer than 1990.
Verifying against historical and past temperatures is good, but it leaves room for bias in your corrections if you have a lot of variables and just end up matching them to the mere 100 years of instrumental record we have. Predicting future temperature trends though, hasn't been as conclusive and solid as you suggest.
Oh, the IPCC report also projected nearly a 10cm rise in sea level from 1990 to today, in reality the measured amount is less than half that.
Even if we were able to improve climate models by leaps and bounds above the current ones (which themselves are pretty accurate), there would still be *some* uncertainty.
It's not that simple. No model will ever likely be entirely accurate, there will always be uncertainty. I'm not a climate scientist, but I know something about computing. In their large ensemble of models (I think there are around 30 of them in CMIP) you would expect some to overestimate, and some to underestimate, and observations (ie The Real World) would fall somewhere in the bell curve between if they represented an anywhere near realistic range of scenarios. That fact that they virtually ALL overestimate warming leads me to think there is something fundamentally wrong with the methodology across the entire group.
If they want us to trust them for anything important they should start by working on that. You don't have to be a climate scientists to think of where the problem might be.
Or the sea levels failing to rise as predicted or the temperature failing to rise as much as predicted or... Works both ways, you see.
I think you just proved his point.
No, I haven't. We can't predict the movement of every molecule in a car colliding with a wall, yet we still somehow manage to model the results with good enough quality.
there is a direct correlation between the rise in fossil fuel use starting with the Industrial Revolution (~1850) and the incremental rise in global average temperatures.
No question it has been warming since at least 1850. Nothing unusual since then.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
If you have a graph plotting CO2 emissions over that time period I would LOVE to see the correlation.
Good luck.
Well, I think they're all full of it. Ocean temps have been rising because of increased activity by underwater volcanoes. Google for it.
It's a reference to 'Vinland', generally believed to be the coast of Labrador. We have found a related settlement at L'Anse Aux Meadows, from the indications and writings it would seem the reports from the new world were a bit embellished. It's not a good reference for historical climates.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
Whatever it is, it's not very relevant in the global warming discussion, because climate != weather.
Actually, it's quite relevant, for climate is simply the integral of weather of a pre-determined amount of time. NASA lays this out quite nicely. Note as a result of selecting a different time basis for the integration, one can have significant - or no - change in climate.
Climate IS, in fact, weather - just over a longer scale
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Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
However, while I'm sure that both 'sides' in this debate are equally guilty of seeing what they want to see, that which confirms their observer bias, I'm not sure that ridiculing weather forecasts is a valid argument against the accuracy and predictive power (or lack thereof) of climate models.
Really? Weather is a simpler, shorter-term analysis than climate, pretty much by definition. If we can't perform the simpler task particularly well, it argues against us being able to do the more complex.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
"Previous estimates of global ocean warming have been significantly underestimated..."
Lies! Denier!
The Science is, was, and shall ever be Settled! Forever and Ever! Amen!
start using your brain people.
Why do you need a brain when you have a "scientific consensus"?
I already feel warm and fuzzy. This isn't about me feeling good about my recycling habits so I can narcicistically say I care and my neighbor doesn't. This is about me wanting to hand a world to my kids that isn't fucked over.
I'm not saying to not use the energy. Burn those fossil fules... maybe just capture the damn carbon? We had a giant SMOG problem, then we regulated and captured those emissions, and smog got a lot better. We have the tech. Just use it.... shit... If the price of gas goes up by a dollar but we don't fuck the world, I'm OK with that...
LOL.
I remember way back in Kindergarten the teacher made fun of the weatherman. His prediction was put on the calendar every day as sunny/raining/etc. The teacher made a red X on every day that the weatherman was wrong. The weatherman was wrong more often than not. There were a LOT of red Xs on the calendar... not that I really understood the calendar that well but red is red.
There has been a LOT of progress made recently. The weather predictions are a lot more accurate nowadays. Almost worrisomely so.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I'll disagree, because we are missing what amounts to more than 2/3 of the data needed for modeling.
To agree would be alarmist, it would be going along to get along. Without the data, attempts to convince me the model is showing this or that just sound like so much manipulation by interested parties. Such as Scientists with a job, that need to do something worthy of keeping that job or the funding alive for it. History has shown private research is hungry to produce results the dollars ask for, college research is easily biased by politics AND money. So, looking out for myself, I poke holes in their half assed research, which heats up their fanbase, but puts the obvious in the open. Like a turd in the punchbowl.
On another note, I can give an example of research for Dollars in action;
Since Seismic activity went up 1000 fold through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, "Studies" have been done by government and oil industry to see if there is correlation between fracking and the 4.4 tremors now rocking the midwest with great frequency. OF COURSE they found no correlation, what are you nuts?
The midwest now gets earthquakes that just HAPPEN to coincide with the advent of local fracking. Just because the quakes were so infrequent and more subtle before is NO indicator that fracking has anything to do with it. THAT is the official word.
So, with all the "hippies" running the global warming show, you can see my hesitation to buy the word of a greasy, smelly, socialist, hippy waving the green flag. I'm going to need more than half assed research, no matter how much money and time has been thrown at it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Since Oceans cover more than 2/3 of the earth, and that data is not factored due to ignorance, I'm going to call that so far from accurate, it almost appears to be blatantly manipulation by biased parties. DUH!
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These aren't weather models, as others will doubtless tell you.
Besides, how many weathermen are very accurate beyond 3 days?
Not good enough, even if it were a factor.
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The models are missing more than 2/3 of the data necessary to begin to believe they have a rudimentary grasp of ANYTHING.
It's a fact that results up to now are a myth propagated by career scientists and college departments striving for relevance and funding,
Nice of you to drop by and wave a flag for your favorite team; we'll call and let you know if you're needed any further.
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I'm saying, instead of working their asses off to produce results, which has landed them in the question of political and monetary bias, they should work their asses off first, to include ALL the criteria necessary to produce a REAL guess.
I view this as missing over 2/3 of the data. So naturally their endeavors seem like a snake oil cure or a carnie blathering crap into a bullhorn in front of the freakshow tent.
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Yes, but what is the OCEANS effect on this. Up until last week, that data was not even considered because we didn't have that data. Now we have the data within grasp and need only the time to compile it. Water covers more than 2/3 of the planet. It is silly, misleading and ignorant to produce results based on less than 1/3 of the necessary data. Further, there may be even more criteria missing, if they were stupid enough to exclude this and try to produce an end product.
It's not that I don't "think" (which is different than "know" or "believe") something may be wrong, but, it cannot be shown in these dark ages of science where money , politics and ambition ARE included in "findings".
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Who cares about global warming or vaccine caused autism? The atmosphere is being corrupted and people are dying or being permanently disfigured due to diseases.
I want to breathe fresh air, not air with mercury, coal dust, carbon particles, and various nasty gasses in it. I would rather my children take the risk of being autistic than the certainty of a crippling disease like polio.
Fuck all of the controversy! I want clean air to breathe and a lack of terrible diseases to infect my children.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Yes, you have. You missed, for example, the entire bit about the null hypothesis. You also missed the fact that I am not asserting that the Earth isn't warming, or that CO_2 increases are probably not a factor in the warming we have experienced. I can actually read a spectrograph and have a decent understanding of the GHE from the basic physics on up. I'm only pointing out that the trivial model you suggest is precisely why we should doubt that TCS is over 2 C! That is, the null hypothesis is around 1 to 1.5 C total warming from CO_2 alone, which is all we have even weak direct evidence for. Everything else is built on a shaky tower of model assumptions, physics toy models, and an attempt to solve a probably unsolvably difficult problem in a particular way to put some sort of stamp of authenticity on a conclusion that is both unfounded and so far, contradicted pretty strongly by observational fact.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I'm saying, instead of working their asses off to produce results, which has landed them in the question of political and monetary bias, they should work their asses off first, to include ALL the criteria necessary to produce a REAL guess. I view this as missing over 2/3 of the data. So naturally their endeavors seem like a snake oil cure or a carnie blathering crap into a bullhorn in front of the freakshow tent.
Oh I'm sure they're *trying*. The problem is it's difficult to judge how good their models are without 1000's of years of solid data. While they do have tons of data I'm sure it's no where near what they'd want to have. A lot of the data they have to rely on from these past events has to be gathered from physical records which is arguably not as good as measuring and observing it today. Not even mentioning we're talking about us altering the current environment in ways that have not been seen naturally occurring for thousands of millennia making any climate modelling increasingly difficult because we're in uncharted territory.
So I think to say they shouldn't say anything at all until they have ALL criteria necessary to produce a REAL guess is a bit too blindly optimistic. It's true it would be ideal in a perfect world, but in reality we'd be sitting here for a hundred years or more before we'd be able to make conjectures following that rule. That's just not extremely practical. The debate in that arena has to stay healthy for it to evolve and the fact that scientists readily admit mistakes with new findings is a good sign. I'm heads over heels against sensationalizing the topic but to sit here and ignore the problem until the science is flawless would be a grave mistake. There's absolutely nothing wrong with us being good custodians and keeping our one and only home clean. It would be the responsible thing for us to do.
Minnesota weather seems to be more variable than weather in many other places. I haven't noticed 95% accuracy in weather predictions, but that doesn't mean the average across the country isn't 95%.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Do you have strong evidence that they are pushing politics over science? They'd be notorious for it in any case, since a lot of people have committed themselves to the belief that there is no AGW, and so they have to come up with some way of disregarding the science.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm pretty sure it was you that diverged from reality... The earth is getting warmer dude... The data is easy to see. It's really easy to see. You can look up satellite pics of ice coverage. A simple Wolfram Alpha search will tell you global mean temperatures, and show you the data sources so you can investigate them better.
How do you people keep insisting nothing is going on? The excuses keep changing. "It's not warming. Ok, it is, but it's solar! Ok, it's not solar, but it's not man made.... It's natural cycles! Ok, it's it's moving too fast for natural cycles, but it paused for the last few years! It's warmer, but it stopped, so it's not warming! Ok, so yeah, Arctic sea ice is dwindling, but antarctic is growing! Ok, sure, arctic is sea ice and antarctic is land ice, but.... It's scientists, just making a grab for lucrative grab for government money! Ok, so that money is shit and it's pretty obvious all the real money is in private industry, but..."
On and on you people go, changing your story. Diverging from reality, if you will.....
furthermore, it's quite obvious that several industries just don't want a drop in profits that would come with regulation. It's quite obvious they've spent a TON of money to muddy the conversation. My question is, in 30 years when we can look back on this, will you !@#$holes fess up that you were wrong the whole time? Will you admit that you all were duped and spent decades ignoring your betters? Will you finally shut up?
Don't worry, I know the answer....
I'd like the alarmists to step first and admit their error. If you look at the First Assessment Report from the IPCC in the early 90's their projections grossly overestimated temperature and sea level rise over the ~25 years through to today. Far from any admission of overstating the danger, here are guys like you doubling down on how foolish everyone else will look in another 30 years. I don't need to guess if you'll finally shut up then, the experiment was run already and the answer is nope.
Fact: Things are getting warmer.
Fact: CO2 emissions contribute to warming.
Fact: Humans are emitting CO2.
Uncertain: What degree of impact will those human CO2 emissions have on global temperatures over the next 30 or 100 years.
Don't go advocating catastrophic changes when not all the facts for that particular position are settled, you look foolish.
Exactly. Models without an AGW term are pretty much useless over the past 50 years or so, despite being not too bad before that. Adding the AGW term makes the fit a lot better for the past 50 years. It's hard to argue that this means there is no AGW.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I very much doubt that you've ever seen a spectrograph or have any actual knowledge of physics. The greenhouse effect of CO2 is easily confirmed by simple experiments, in particular.
And what's your crap about the "null hypothesis" and "basic physics" has to do with it?
The Earth is warming. Rising CO2 concentration provides explanation why it happens. Both are facts.
The details of the warming, on the other hand, are extremely complicated.
Sorry, but people with simplistic arguments are not entitled to question anything with silly arguments. People who have no fucking idea about science should stop trying to make arguments with others using their political ideas pretending they are science. Anyway: I bet your pals are waiting for you to go to the Taco Bell to Open Carry and Roll the Coal. Don't make them wait, else they may take you for a liberal!!!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
I'd settle for something more credible than all this. I agree with you, being good custodians IS the responsible thing to do, anyway. Meanwhile, keeping a population fed and working with a modern standard of living in industrial nations, while doing the legwork necessary to implement change that doesn't endanger the former, should be done in a trustworthy non-fanatical way. If not, lessons not learned ,they will "continue to bang their heads", "doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results" until it feels better or comes to consequence.
Do it right, and don't come running in here every 10 minutes, waving your arms and shouting, "The Sky is Falling, The Sky is Falling!" everytime one of your expensive new toys coughs up some theoretical sampling of what it could be like if only we lived in cartoonland and tell me it's credible or YOU'RE FIRED FLINTSTONE! I suppose that about sums it up.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
And? If he can't read the absorption spectrum of CO2 then it's not my fault that he's growing senile.
Polished off a bottle of raspberry mead this summer. Yummmm
Wonder if they ever put mushrooms in it.....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I not only have seen spectrographs of the atmospheric radiative effect, I actually own a copy of Grant Petty's book A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation", and have taught both undergrad and grad electrodynamics for over 30 years. Precisely what does this have to do with my statements above? I'm not "denying" that the greenhouse effect exists -- there is direct spectroscopic evidence for it. I can derive one simple model (a complete absorber model leading to 1.19x warming) for it on a piece of paper in three minutes. I regularly argue with people who want to claim that it doesn't exist at all, or that it violates the second law. Both are absurd -- of course it exists, and no it doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics it is a direct consequence of them (although the actual atmospheric radiation effect is a great deal more complex than simple single layer models!)
All of this is completely irrelevant to my statements above. Let me explain the null hypothesis, since the terminology apparently eludes you. It is this: Supposed we increase atmospheric CO_2 from 300 to 600 ppm in the very simplest model planet we can imagine -- one where the only change we permit is this. One can work through the arguments for the greenhouse warming one should expect -- they involve looking at the measured spectrum of CO_2, doing a bit of work with the relevant Beers-Lambert formula, and thinking a bit about the lapse rate -- but in the end most people who do the calculation end up with somewhere between a 1 C and 1.5 C warming.
At this point one invokes the principle of ignorance -- we don't really know how the entire Earth system will respond nonlinearly to this. Nor do we have any plausible means with which to measure it -- we have no experimental Earths to do controlled observations with similar structure, e.g. 70% saltwater ocean confined in a complex pattern of continents -- and we already know that the establishment of particular circulation patterns of the confined ocean and atmosphere were the sole really plausible explanation for the Pliestocene ice age, which started when the isthmus of Panama closed between 3 and 4 million years ago.
We also know one important point from linear stability analysis. For the Earth's climate system to be stable at all, it has to respond to perturbations in forcing by opposing the change, not augmenting it. That is, at a stable point, the response to all perturbations has to be to push the system back to the stable point, not away from it, or the point isn't stable, it is unstable, like balancing a pencil on its point. This principle is taught in introductory first year physics, so presumably you are familiar with it.
The Earth's top of atmosphere "forcing" varies by roughly 90 W/m^2 every year, simply from the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. It varies by order of a percent from fluctuations in albedo (mostly due to clouds, but also due to shrinking and expanding ice and snow fields) on a much shorter time scale, as short as days. The climate is if anything remarkably stable, at least on a short time scale (and we have the devil's own time explaining any of the longer time scale variations observed in the paleo record or the much shorter thermometric record, where the stable point itself exhibits considerable climate "drift" even while remaining sufficiently locally stable to be still considered "climate"). There is little evidence of any sort of runaway nonlinear instability from this natural variation in forcing. Quite the opposite, in fact, right up to the point where factors we do not yet really understand and cannot compute or predict seem to cause transitions like the advent of glaciation in the current, continuing, Pleistocene ice age.
Given a lack of knowledge of how the enormously complex system will respond to a small, linear variation in forcing on top of the annual periodic variation in forcing that is roughly two orders of magnitude larger and incid
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Now drop the mike :)
We also know one important point from linear stability analysis. For the Earth's climate system to be stable at all, it has to respond to perturbations in forcing by opposing the change, not augmenting it.
Or maybe flipping between two extremes? How about that for a "null hypothesis"? Do you know that once there were trees growing in the Antarctic?
Oh, and since we're talking hypothetical shit without any real connection to the actual science, you MUST also mention the possibility of the Venus effect - runaway greenhouse warming. Why do you think it's impossible? After all, the Sun is growing hotter and this time _just_ might be nonlinearly different! If we think about the nonlinear systems then we MUST fail on the side of caution and stop ALL the CO2 emissions NOWNOWNOWNOW!!!!!!!111111
And reality check - we actually do know quite a bit about actual climate processes and we can model them with a significant precision. The models show that the global warming won't be catastrophic for the environment itself, but it'll cause wild upheavals in the human economy.
Consider, I'm going to roll a 6 sided dice. What number am I going to roll?
Whatever your answer is, it's going to be wrong roughly 83% of the time, and your answer will differ from the actual roll by, on average, 1.9. The error factor in your answer amounts to nearly a third of the possible range of answers.
Now consider, I'm going to roll a 6 sided dice 1000 times. What will the average of all those rolls be?
I strongly suspect that your answer is going to be roughly 3.5. And, strangely, the correct answer is likely to be very very close to 3.5. It's unlikely to be exactly 3.5 of course, but the error factor in the answer is going to amount to fractions of a percent.
Well, I'm not totally taken by my attempt at an analogy, though I think it has some potential. I'll have to think on it some more.
...Weather is a simpler, shorter-term analysis than climate, pretty much by definition.
I'm not sure I'm going to agree with this statement however. Is an apple a simpler fruit than an orange?
Consider, I'm going to roll a 6 sided dice. What number am I going to roll?
The whole of climate science and meteorology is predicated on the fact that those systems are not random. Yeah, the more iterations of a random event, the closer you get to the statistical average. But that doesn't mean that the more variables you add to a system, the more it converges on a predictable single value.
I'm not sure I'm going to agree with this statement however. Is an apple a simpler fruit than an orange?
Is an orange the aggregate of millions of apples over a long period of time?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Well, the most recent IPCC report exaggerates the degree of certainty about extreme weather and downplays the significance of having to lower the range of estimates on forcing from human produced CO2. And notice how suddenly the language of the executive summary changed to estimating degree of certainty when it didn't hold for previous reports. While I hope that is a precursory to a more rational and unbiased report, I can't help but think that it is strictly a defensive change in response to short term climate deviating from the models.