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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.
I see only the raw data on the link. I think that farmers would be interested in their local projections but we need tools to see them.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Damnable lies set forth to put the middle class down.
Why are they doing this? The science is settled. The models are correct. We know what is going to happen in the future. 99% of scientists agree. What other data is needed?
There.s a 0.1 degree difference in the maximum temperature in Fargo for today.
Clearly, all of science must be wrong and I can pretty much make up anything I like and claim it is reality.
Winning!
Oh God! When the general media gets a hold of the projections and they prove to be not perfect, the pundits are gonna come out and claim that all of NASA's climate research is garbage. The Republicans will want to reduce NASA's budget even more.
Let's face it projections are never right. They're to be used as a planning guide: not exact numbers - things could even be worse. Sure, you make get a really wet season and maybe a season of record snow, but down the line you need to plan. If the California farmers planned better, they wouldn't be in the shit they are in now. They were told.
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.
Is this the un"adjusted" raw data, or does it have the various "adjustments" that have been applied to the historical data before in past releases?
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.
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.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Does the data include the chemtrails and their effects? Does it divulge why those chemicals have been sprayed into the air for the last 2 decades, and very heavily recently?
"Why in the World are They Spraying?" Documentary HD (multiple language subtitles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEfJO0-cTis
Why is the data no missing prior to 2012?
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview/?p=geographic&l=MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor,Reference_Labels,Coastlines&t=2015-06-08&v=-107.130247114811,6.3888177285642485,-50.458372114811,45.37709897856425
In other words, making shit up based on assumptions.
Stop with the GW/CC articles. For another opinion go to:
www.wattsupwiththat.com
Oh, and by the way, watch this post get hidden due to it being posted by an AC and /. groupthink.
Why do I keep coming to /.?
They'll have updated numbers out pretty soon so I'll wait for those.
Actually, a great improvement for this would be auto-update functionality so they could push out updates anytime. That way we will always have the most up to date historical data!
Only surface data? What we need is the vertical temperature/pressure/humidity profiles. Whatever the spatial and temporal resolution at the surface, it is not enough to figure out what is going on. It is great that this data is made available, but it is simply not sufficient data. The vertical profiles from a few hundred places around the world at different latitudes and time of day would be much more useful.
Quite frankly, this topic has left all semblance of being in touch with reality. It does simply not matter how much proof you find for or against climate change. Neither side will give a shit about scientific data after they've invested pretty much everything and their reputation for it.
I really, really hope the deniers are right. Sadly, I'm terribly afraid they ain't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Your uninformed, uneducated opinion is worthless because you have zero understanding of data collection.
Do you even understand what "unadjusted data" means?
The answer is no, you don't; you are in fact completely ignorant on the subject.
Perhaps you need to enroll in college with an ABET accredited engineering school, take 2 years of engineering and physics courses followed by a year of instrumentation courses then you might start to understand what is going on.
There's a reason why scientists agree on what is happening, and the republitarians deny it--Its called ignorance.
Climate change posts on /. are one of those places where sysadmins who flunked out of community college get to tell the world how they know better than thousands of PhD holding climatologists. So funny.
Projection = data we made up
And while I'm sure they are confident in their projections, they used their largest computers, their best models, etc., I'm also equally sure the scientists were equally confident of their projections in the seventies when they declared we'd be 'enjoying' an ice age right about now...
Ken
The data includes both historical measurements from around the world and simulated projections
Simulated based on what assumptions? What model?
I hope they've labeled the actual measured historical data so it can be separated from the made-up stuff.
If little baby Jesus didn't think NASA was important enough to put in The Bible then why should anyone bother about them?
data set or data set of massive climate change?
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.
Their top projection - the one that's getting a lot of play - suggests they think we're going to hit 935 ppm CO2 by 2099.
Which is nearly twice what most of the "mainstream" projections calls for, and is pretty much fantasy at this point - it's above the IPCC's worst case scenario (and a couple of hundred ppm above anything like a reasonable example).
The one that's closest to reality is for 538 ppm CO2 - and you have to look pretty close to notice any difference from right now. Although they gave us some "1950" baseline images, so you can actually see the difference (and notice that the "catastrophic" part of CAGW doesn't seem to be coming any time in the next 85 years).
NASA is releasing global climate change projections to help scientists and planners better understand local and global effects of hazards.
Now if they'd only make available [1] the models (as in code) used to generate those projections and [2] a supercomputer to run it on, then someone could actually use this. The historical data has been available to interested scientists for a long time: releasing it to the public on a website provides only the appearance of openness. Without the transparency of how those projections were generated, the value of them is the same as a press release from a known politically-biased entity. (Yes, I'm talking about the Obama administration, which can't stop the endless string of daily press releases likely to be contradicted a couple of Tuesdays later.)
While I appreciate the opportunity to download 11TB of data, it would be a lot nicer if there was a high-level summary somewhere of what the projections are actually indicating are most likely to happen. I've looked but can't find one. Anyone found anything?
They were already busted falsifying and modifying data. Liberal moonbats, the lot of 'em!
Still can't predict tomorrow weather accurately, much less next weeks weather. And yet here we have a forecast until 2100 to within a degree or two!
From articles I've read, a feedback loop in the atlantic ocean is already triggered. Genie is out of the bottle. Adapt or die.
A small essay I wrote a few years ago:
Not a denier, but I think there's a few things to understand. One, look at the history of this world, it's atmosphere has changed composition many many times through its long history, before we were even a dream in our ancestral DNA.
Two, the amount of change occurring seems to me to vastly over stated. There's change. Sure we caused it, we're a part of this planet, our activities affect the planet. Have to a utter moron to deny that.
Three, on a whole, the big picture, civilization on the whole, is not changing, and its not going to change. We're going to keep building factories and cutting down forests. No matter how loudly you people scream, business will go on.
And most important of all! We are humans, the most adaptable creature this planet has produced so far. We will adapt to the changes around us. Also, there's this talk of 'positive feedback', a cycle has been started that feeds back on itself and grows, we have NO CLUE how to stop it, even if we stopped all emissions this very instant, the feedback loop has already begun. We will simply have to adapt now. Good thing we're the most adaptable species on the earth.
The only debatable point in this whole argument is.. how fast? Stuff is changing, the only part we can even hope to affect is how fast it's changing. Will cutting emissions slow the change? Hell if I know, I don't think anyone can answer that with any certainty. We barely understand the planetary mechanics going on around us. We like to think we do, FFS, we can't even predict the weather a week out. You expect us to predict how emissions are affecting the climate? Wishful thinking, really REALLY wishful arrogant thinking.
Of course, it's utter folly to think we can force a unchanging climate that is perfect for us, all the time, for thousands of years to come. Existence itself is defined by change. The title of a favorite song of mine sticks in my head: The only constant in the universe is change.
http://xkcd.com/1321/
> simulated projections based on those measurements.
Oh, goody! More made-up numbers based on models not published written by who knows who with who knows what personal agenda using money from who-knows where. That'll clear everything right up!
THE FIX IS IN!
So, would it fit on 11x1 terabyte drives? Or would I need more?
history has shown predictions are reliably unreliable.
but, postdictions, my good men, afford reasonable comfort.
The fact that you don't even care to look is why you can and will continue to demand the model code.
GISS Model E.
Go get it you frigging denier moron.
Wow! Multiple Climate Change (TM) articles in one day? How lucky are we?!? When do we start seeing a Climate Change (TM) 24-hour web stream? How else will we get our sensationalist propaganda at any time of the day or night?
Might as well use the Farmer's Almanac for all the value those predictions have; what models were used, what assumptions, what is the margin of error, what is worst case/best case?
The danger is that now, more than ever, political and policy decisions will be made that will significantly affect people, all based on a _guess_ of unknown quality. Too depressing for words.
The only people who will be happy with this are those who stand to profit.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
>Considering we don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow, or whether it will rain at my house, I'm pretty sure we don't know what the climate will be in 100 years. So, not settled in my book.
That's a ridiculously stupid claim to make. Climate is a LOT simpler than weather. Many, many orders of magnitude simpler. Why ? Because climate is an average.
Climate is an average of weather over long periods (30 years typically). That's a LOT simpler to predict than the individual weather points that make it up.
Apples meet oranges. With weather the prediction is based on well known conditions in the surrounding areas. We then are able to map out the likely changes for the next couple of days. The more days you go out, the less certain things become. The trick though is that when predicting tomorrow's weather, you are working with a very complete set of initial conditions.
Compare that to climate in 100 years or 300 years. You have the initial conditions still, but mapping out what planetary ice, plants, ocean currents and water vapor are gonna do to the TOA energy balance that drives climate decade after decade is hardly simple. Compare to a 5 day weather forecast, it is as a matter of fact much more challenging. Add onto that the fact that weather models can be tested against NEW data almost weekly, while climate models need to wait decades for actual true NEW data to compare projections against.
If you want to predict the average of weather, that's different than predicting changes to the climate. Average weather is as simple as observing something global average temperature next year will be much like this year +/- 0.5C. You can even confidently declare that global average temperature 25 years from today will again be the same as this year +/- 1.0 C. Climate scales stretch out to hundreds of years where the overall energy imbalance can swing things a couple of degrees. As I quoted directly above you, that projection of TOA energy is still an unsolved problem that requires corrections for modelled hindcasts to be reasonable.
Climate projections are every bit as challenging as weather projections, and when taken in context climate modelling faces many unique challenges that weather does not. Most importantly that weather models can be tested and refined on a much shorter time frame and against many, many more datasets.
tl;dr
Or in this case tl;dd
Guys their projections for global temperature are so far off that it is laughable. They are not even close any more. Please adjust your receiver.
If you want to read a great explanation of why the IPCC models are broken beyond belief there was a great article describing that and all the other problems with climate science by Dr Brown of Duke university
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/06/real-science-debates-are-not-rare/
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
All 5 of the major datasets (RSS, UAH, HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC) show no warming for between 14 and almost 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen 8-10%.