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Global Warming Predictions May Now Be a Lot Less Uncertain (wired.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Humanity must not pass a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in global temperature from pre-industrial levels, so says the Paris climate agreement. Cross that line and the global effects of climate change start looking less like a grave situation and more like a catastrophe. The frustrating bit about studying climate change is the inherent uncertainty of it all. Predicting where it's going is a matter of mashing up thousands of variables in massive, confounding systems. But today in the journal Nature, researchers claim they've reduced the uncertainty in a key metric of climate change by 60 percent, narrowing a range of potential warming from 3C to 1.2C. And that could have implications for how the international community arrives at climate goals like it did in Paris. The metric is called equilibrium climate sensitivity, but don't let the name scare you.
wow, new record? third global warming article today
How long before it is deemed a punishable crime to not participate in the movement to curb anthropomorphic global warming? As an idea, it is gaining traction.
The only way to tell if this is real is to wait, take the measurement, and compare it with prior prediction. That's science. Everything else is speculation.
Is short-term weather forecast not a science? Or does it only work when looking backwards? Prediction of climate is as much science as orbital mechanics predicting where the moon will be. Albeit more complex, and with more uncertainty.
Sometimes you can't just wait. When the measurement can only be taken after catastrophic change has happened? What then?
Science is based on testable predictions. Until we find out that global warming predictions are correct it is not proven science.
this study, possibly intentionally, understates the risks. What it did is look at existing modeling to narrow the range of predicted warming. That completely misses the fact that scientists are *conservative* when they build models. When there are factors they can't reliably model, they often just exclude them. This is why their models consistently *under predict* the amount of warming we see. For example, a recent Scientific American article pointed out that scientists weren't including feedback effects like the warming of the permafrost because the couldn't model it. This means the math trick used in this article excludes all these other effects that can (and almost surely will) have *huge* accelerative effects on the modeled warming rates. Far from scare mongering, the conservativism of scientists means they nearly always under predict warming. So what can we expect? Well, the last time Earth had the levels of CO2 we now have in the atmosphere, sea level was up to 100 feet higher than today and ferns grew in the Arctic. This was before man even existed on the planet. And the rates of warming and CO2 rise, far from slowing, are increasing at an *accelerating* rate. So I call bullshit on this article.
Imagine that it's your job to tell the future. An amazing amount of money, and possibly lives depend on your forecast. Your tools are math and temperature measurements.
That's the situation that climate scientists find themselves in. I used to do some comparatively very simple modeling of satellite electronics to show that system data integrity and uptime would be satisfactory in the midst of cosmic radiation - and in the whole field of reliability and radiation effects, there's an absurd amount of handwaving and slop. I was regularly dealing with uncertainty on the order of 10x-100x in the error rates of some components. Thankfully, in most cases you can afford to apply tons of margin to your estimate to cover all of those unknowns.
Climate scientists have it much harder. The analysis is far more complex and much more sensitive - there's almost no room for error. The measurements are imperfect, the models are incomplete, and uncertainty abounds. However, the trend is there. What are we going to do, bury our heads in the sand and hope for the best?
Instead, it seems like we should listen to the smartest people in the world on this topic, who have devoted their lives to it. We should applaud the advances like this, which make incremental progress towards a better understanding. That same process of incremental advancement of human knowledge has given us the most advanced civilization in human history.
Most importantly, we should especially celebrate this kind of advance, which reduces uncertainty in the forecast, because that's the real key to reducing the political hysteria, and to bringing sanity into the discussion.
Climate scientists are just normal people. They aren't infallible. They also aren't corrupt psychopaths. They have an impossible job in front of them. And in the absence of a crystal ball, they are the very best resource we have available for figuring out what the hell we should do about all this.
We would all do better to listen to what they are actually saying, and stop reflexively misrepresenting them to suit our preconceptions.
Wouldn't this be an opportunity for the admins of slashot to keep track of the IP's of these posters and do some basic investigations into who is posting this crap?
Wouldn't exposing an astro-turfing industry both catapult them into fame as well as clean up and improve the quality of their main product? They're pretty easy to identify, any coward downvoted into oblivion in a climate change article. You'd expect the pros to run through a variety of VPN services. And while the slashdot admins don't have warrants (although the FCC and FBI would) they can always ask the VPNs to help save the world. Separating the shills from the people who legitimately have this sort of political view isn't trivial. But how many astroturfing companies can there be? The bulk of traffic would come from a single source.
It's arguably an abuse of power. And I don't want to start a witch-hunt. But astroturfing is likely a violation of some EULA and itself an abuse.