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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.
There's really a massive amount of scientific literature trying to understand how much warming will happen and how bad it will be. Papers suggesting that one aspect will not be bad or might be overestimated are not at all uncommon. But that's very different than thinking that global warming itself isn't a serious problem. Unfortunately, people who have made not believing in global warming an article of faith and tribal loyalty will always respond in one of two ways: something about the danger of global warming is obvious alarmist nonsense, and anything that actual scientists do that suggests an upper bound on how bad some aspect is must in fact mean that global warming is no problem at all.
Perhaps, but the assessment of the climate change movement as a religion predates Trump's Presidency by at least a decade. Maybe two.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The world is heating up, we will survive
Not without a lot of adjustments. Agriculture will have to change. Many places will become arid. Populations will move and of course there are people already where they want to move so expect lots and lots of wars.
Political systems and economic systems will be put under immense strains - even ditched.
So, yes, humanity will survive but not without some incredible changes.
Let's put it this way: the American way of life will disappear because it is unsustainable. The free market capitalism that many of us worship will be our end.
But that's in a couple of generations. None of us will be alive to see it. So, who cares about our grandchildren's generation, right?
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.
Is short-term weather forecast not a science?
Yes, it is a science. It makes predictions, then we see if those predictions were accurate.
Or does it only work when looking backwards?
Well, that's the part where we see if the predictions were accurate. So yes, sort of?
Prediction of climate is as much science as orbital mechanics predicting where the moon will be.
Right. Orbital mechanics was accepted when the observations ended up matching the predictions.
Sometimes you can't just wait. When the measurement can only be taken after catastrophic change has happened? What then?
Hopefully we decided to play the odds and prepare for the outcome that was 98% likely.
Remember, science doesn't prove anything. Proofs are for mathematicians. Climate Change is "less proven" than gravity because we've conducted thousands of controlled experiments confirming the details of gravity. We don't have a bunch of extra Earths lying around, so it's much more difficult to conduct controlled experiments that would confirm details and help improve the precision of the models and predictions.
Of course, you still have to be either a complete idiot or a selfish asshole to think that Climate Change is a hoax and bet your grandkid's existence on that 2% chance.
"If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it."
Pierre Gallois
"I don't understand X, and it's really inconveniently for me to believe X, therefore I believe it's impossible for anyone to understand X."
-pipingguy (paraphrasing)
I stole this Sig
Stupid talking point. You don't find spontaneous generation in med textbooks because the idea was replaced with a better one. When climate change denialists have some superior science, call us. Until then you're as big a tool as anti-vaxxers, who also refuse to listen to "experts", because reasons.
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.
not in regards to AGW. you aren't a skeptic, you're a denier.
That phrasing presupposes that the thing in question is 'true' -- which makes it really, really hard to have a rational conversation.. definitely more like a religious debate at that point.