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NASA Releases Massive Climate Change Data Set
An anonymous reader writes: NASA is releasing global climate change projections to help scientists and planners better understand local and global effects of hazards. The data includes both historical measurements from around the world and simulated projections based on those measurements. "The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe." You can download them and look through the projections yourself at NASA's Climate Model Data Services page.
More data is always good, but presenting any uncertainty and conditions on predictions is vital. Not only so we make properly informed decisions, but also so we don't tarnish trust by misrepresented predictions.
Climate models are really great science, but are also really ripe for this sort of problematic viewing from the public. Not just the laymen, but informed and educated public as well. To just quickly read and peruse climate model summaries you'd get the impression that confidence in models is really high. The reality is that confidence in PORTIONS of the models is really high. The whole however still has a long ways to go.
The IPCC fifth assessment report in chapter 9 notes the following:
Model tuning aims to match observed climate system behaviour and so is connected to judgements as to what constitutes a skilful representation of the Earth’s climate. For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
That's taken context and backed up by over a dozen citations to relevant journal articles on model tuning. The short version is that tuning Top Of Atmosphere energy is still a required step to avoid climate models running out to unrealistic states. The journal articles all confirm this. With TOA energy being the ultimate overall driving force behind climate change, our predictions are still subject to the fact we aren't yet able to predict TOA energy. Without that we can make guesses what TOA energy might do, but the confidence in them is nothing like the confidence in other components of climate. Failing to qualify this though could leave us 20 years from now pointing at the AR5 projections and asking what went so terribly wrong with them, and the answer is that they had things largely right, save that TOA energy rose faster or slower than anticipated. That's in essence already the conversation over the IPCC First assessment projections from the 20+ years ago.
Because this is how science works. You look at the data, you look at it again. Then let other look at.
Nothing is ever "settled" this isn't the hysterical bible beaters that think a 2000 year old book holds all the answers.
SCIENCE is abouting questioning everything.
While snarky. The only proper way is what the gp said to do. It will remove much of the 'hidden agendas' and whatnot. It will let us get down to 'is this real or not' (probably). But it lets everyone see what is going on. These dudes are asking for *LOTS* of money to do this. It is worth looking thru. It lets people make their own adjustments or undo ones where the data didnt fit some model (and was discarded). The only proper way to do this sort of science is in the open.
The best part was reading emails of them bragging on their adjustment methods. I expect the parent post to get modded down to oblivion because so many people believe that the ends justify the means.
It's true: every denier is a worthless idiot, and the vast majority of those who accept anthropogenic climate change has a poor understanding of how and why it works. That's perhaps 90-95% of everybody discussing the question.
But there are still perhaps 5-10% of people who have at least a rough grasp of what's going on, and they're capable of actually discussing the real questions. Not the stupid questions, which are a waste of everybody's time, but real ones, like "how can we refine the models?" and "what are we going to do about it?" The latter may seem irrelevant, since government action is stymied by denialists, and individual actions are largely unimportant. (I'm glad you bought a Prius, and it is helping a bit, but not nearly enough by several orders of magnitude.)
Still... as bad as it is, stuff does get done. If we're locked in by chemistry and the suicide pact that our Constitution has turned into, we can at least take mitigating actions. The earlier we know about how agriculture is going to change, the better. We can take at least minor defensive measures for our flooded coastal cities. The US military needs to prepare for the various wars that are driven, in part, by climate-change driven poverty. It's even worthwhile to consider the "winners", like those Canadian farmers who will be able to take land that hasn't been touched and which finally has a growing season long enough.
It's not optimal; it's not even as good as is pragmatically feasible. But it's the best we can do in that paradox of democracy, where somehow all of us collectively are supposed to be smarter than the average of us individually. The majority of deniers and the majority of well-meaning but clueless (albeit correct) believers roughly cancel out and hopefully, hopefully it leaves a tiny minority able to do something that's better than not knowing at all. Thin gruel, but it's the best we can get.
In my opinion, to conduct proper science on climatological measurements, the raw measurements should be available to all, to let everyone apply any "adjustments" and "corrections" they believe are necessary - and justified - taking them into account. Then each can properly check the works of their predecessors, and reach their own conclusions, without incorporating unknown distortions from previous work.
Well, how "raw" do you want that data to be? Individual bits of the satellite telemetry? Scribbled notes in a scientist's lab-book? Actual tree-ring samples, and not just?
Most "raw" data is unintelligble to anyone but the experimenters, until it is processed into a form suitable for sharing with others. Instrument calibrations, systematic effects, elimination of confounding factors, etc... all of these need to be performed by the scientists who are closest to the data and the instruments that provided it.
Like it or not, the data needs to be curated in some way, before it can be consumed meaningfully by the larger community.
If the maintainers of the archive believe adjustments are needed to deal with some measurement pathology, they are welcome to also release an open correction dataset or tool in parallel.
Many scientists do, if it makes sense in context. See above.
With the low price and high speed of modern digital storage and processing devices, data set size and complexity is no excuse for withholding the raw data.
The size and complexity of some raw datasets can in fact make it unfeasible to provide in a meaningful way. Again, see above.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
if they gave you the unadjusted data you would think global warming was 20% worse (warmer) than it is, because the overall effect of the adjustments has been to reduce the apparent warming shown in the data.
and again the whole "just give us the data" argument seems silly. I mean, sure, they could give it to you (indeed if you dig the data is out there).
but based on what precise qualifications will you be basing your second guessing ?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
http://xkcd.com/1321/