I doubt climate modelers will ever try to predict specific weather events. It's probably not possible more than a few weeks ahead in any event. It comes down to the difference between climate and weather. One way to look at climate is it's the statistical description of weather. Here is the World Meteorological Organization's definition of climate:
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather," or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
Weather is too chaotic to predict for any length of time but it is chaotic within bounds. Their will never be at 100C or -100C temperature recorded and there are limits to how much precipitation and wind you can get. Climate describes those bounds and to the extent the bounds shift because of anthropogenic climate change weather will shift to remain within them. Because climate describes the chaos within weather it can not be chaotic in the same way. Chaos in climate comes from such things as the variability of the Sun, long term changes in geological processes and human influences on climate but climate is mostly an energy balance problem and the secondary effects of temperature, precipitation, wind and other things will change in response to changes in the energy balance.
Climate models, especially regional models, can predict some things like likelihood of long term dryer conditions in the US southwest which appears to be happening but they will never predict with precision something like Sandy or the big Midwest drought this year, just the probability of such an event happening.
The ozone destroyers, acid rain and particulate emissions all have relatively short lifetimes in the atmosphere. All it takes to to reduce the damage they caused is to reduce or eliminate emissions of the things that caused them and they wash out in a few years (or decades in the case of ozone destroyers). That isn't the case with CO2 or more generally carbon in the active carbon cycle. Once it is there it takes thousands of years for natural processes to reduce the level significantly. That means on human time scales it's close to irreversible. Even if we do things to actively remove carbon from the carbon cycle it's hard to imagine we could do it any where nearly as fast as we put it in. Once we stop adding carbon to the cycle the changes will start slowing down after 30 or 40 years but even then it will take hundreds of years for the ice caps to catch up with the forcing. The other thing that's irreversible is species extinction. Once they're gone, they're gone.
So you're right, we have to overcome the efforts to suppress addressing the problem but that just stops it from getting worse (after a few decades). The changes already wrought won't go away anytime soon.
Of course the big climate models don't even try to predict such specific weather events in any case. At best what you can get from them is that the probability of such an event has gone up or down because of AGW. If they have predicted an increase probability for something then the fact that it occurs more often is evidence the theory is correct.
What do I really care? I'll be long dead and gone by the time it is a real problem,...
Unless you're something like 80 years old I wouldn't count on that. As the story points out the effects are already manifesting themselves and it's not like a light switch where it's either on or off. Instead the effects just gradually keep getting worse and worse until you wake up some day and say "What happened?!". And even if we do start to do something about it there will be 30 or 40 years of continuing worsening before the climate catches up with the forcing.
Lastly the cliche "Think of the children" applies. If you don't care about yourself do you care about your children or if you have none the children of your family and friends, but maybe you don't any of those either.
Sometimes, a "scientist" has preestablished conclusions, for which he needs to find substantiating evidence.
It's true that scientists come up with hypotheses that they then test but anyone who ignores contrary evidence is not being a scientist.
The other problem with your cynicism is that scientists are (usually) smart people. They have to know that if they can find that contrary evidence to their hypothesis then others will too sooner or later. I doubt there are many scientists willing to risk their reputations and careers like that by publishing something they know to be false, especially in a hot field like climate science. To think that climate scientists could maintain a conspiracy so long with so many involved strains credulity. After all the idea that CO2 in the atmosphere affects the energy balance of the Earth is over 100 years old and intense study of the climate reaches at least back into the 1950's and 1960's.
The reality that you and I live in doesn't care what we think and will do what it will do regardless of any preconceived notions we may have. Scientists merely try to understand that reality better and have no way to make it be something it isn't.
Greenland ice cores only go back 100,000 years or so. The oldest ice cores that I'm aware of are around 800,000 years from Antarctica. The attraction of this new site is apparently the snowfall is greater in this area than in most of Antarctica and so the layers in the ice core will be thicker allowing more precision in the measurements. They're saying this is preliminary research that could eventually lead to million year old ice cores.
It's sad this got modded informative. The data that Jones deleted was from temperature stations he wasn't using in his analysis and is still available from the original sources. In fact the BEST study used data from all sources so it included the data that Jones deleted. BEST's results were very similar to Jones's. You have to remember, back when Jones deleted it that data storage was still quite expensive.
Well, technically speaking by the definition scientists use we're in an ice age because there are still extensive ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. But I presume you're talking about what scientists refer to as a glaciation where ice sheets advance on the continents. There were never more than a minority of scientists who thought that was a possibility and it got a little attention in the 1970's but was over by 1980. From 1966 to 1980 there were around 44 papers published on global warming and only 7 published on cooling.
... a 15 year stretch without statistically significant warming at the 95% or better confidence level
I read somewhere that the calculated confidence level was around 93% so it's not like it wasn't even close.
I know that it is physics-based dogma that solar variation cannot possibly affect climate...
Don't be silly. Any climatologist will tell you that's the first thing you have to take into account for the climate. We've had good measurements of insolation since the 1950's and very good satellite measurements since satellites started measuring it in the 1970's (or early 1980's). The simple fact is that the Sun's output hasn't varied enough to account for all of the temperature change. At best it can account for less than 10% of it. On top of that if the warming was caused by the Sun the whole atmosphere would be warming. But in fact the stratosphere has been cooling, a signature of greenhouse gas caused warming.
Sunspot records go back to before the beginning of the thermometric era and they are a good analog for solar activity. Global temperatures during that time track pretty well with solar activity until around the middle of the 20th century. Did you know that the temperature difference between the low of the Little Ice Age and the middle of the 20th century is only about 1 degree C? It doesn't take that much temperature change to make a significant difference.
Climate scientists are well aware of the various problems with the observations and account for them with error bars and confidence levels.
Under all of that it just keeps nagging me that you can't ignore the physics. The absorption of IR by CO2 is easily demonstrated in the lab. The signature of CO2 absorption is seen when comparing top of atmosphere spectra with near surface spectra. It seems illogical to think increasing CO2 won't increase Earthly temperatures.
I try to stick to the science and name calling is not my style although occasionally I get goaded into it.
a) 16 years is certainly not long enough to measure a climate trend. There is too much noise from natural variation. If you look at graphs of global temperature you see plenty of times where temperatures dipped on longer than a decadal time scale. The long term trend is still up. Climatologists generally use 30 year running means* to describe climate. That's probably a bit arbitrary, maybe 25 years would work but I think 20 years would be getting pretty iffy.
b) Climate models are tested by hindcasting all the time, especially using period of detailed climate knowledge since the 1950's. And again, climate models are not even really attempting to predict the last 16 years in the detail you seem to demand. It's that 30 year climate period thing again.
c) While summer Arctic sea ice has declined by around 2.5 million km^2 Antarctic has only grown by around 0.3 million km^2. (ref.) I'd say that is a significant difference.
Sea level is a surprisingly complex topic and not as isostatic as you might think. For instance land that was under the continental ice sheets during the last glaciation is still rebounding from the depression that the weight of all that ice caused (and land to the south that was bulged up at the same time is dropping at the same time). That affects the perception of sea level at those locations. Also for instance the sea level around Greenland is significantly higher than it otherwise would be because of the gravitational attraction of the Greenland ice sheet. IIRC on the order of 10-30 feet. So as that ice melts the sea level around Greenland will actually drop some while rising elsewhere. The same applies to the Antarctic ice sheet. Also ocean currents and prevailing winds affect sea level and changes in them will have a non-isostatic affect.
One more thing, by my understanding SLR has gone from around 1 mm/year in the early 1900's to around 2 mm/year in mid century to over 3 mm/year since the early 1990's. If you are a physicist it might be worth your time to seek out some actual recent papers by physical oceanographers on their findings about SLR.
His supposed point demonstrates his lack of understanding of what climate models do and more generally his lack of understanding of the difference between climate and weather. more than any failing climate models may have. Global warming did not stop 16 years ago. It's absurd to think it has.
Why not go directly to the source? The Met Office issued a press release in response to the Daily Mail story by David Rose that basically says he's full of it.
Interestingly Brad Werner presented a talk titled "Is Earth F**ked?" at the recently concluded AGU meeting. You can find the abstract and view the presentation here. His answer is probably unless we start seeing the kind of activism around the world like that that accompanied the civil rights movement and anti Vietnam war movement of the 1960's.
Aside from the fact that 16 years is too short a time period to meaningfully measure a temperature trend the temperature has been rising since then, just not as fast as it was in the 1980's and 1990's. You also have to consider ocean temperature change since over 90% of the Sun's energy absorbed by the Earth goes there.
In climate science the arguing about the big things has largely stopped. They've moved on to the details. They aren't getting rich over this so I'm trying to figure out where greed comes in.
If wind and solar were truly cheaper than coal and nuclear then it would not require government subsidies...
Nuclear power requires government subsidies too. The two nuclear plants now being built in Georgia required $8.33 billion in government loan guarantees in order to get construction funding. All nuclear plants require government supplied insurance because no private insurer is willing to take the risk.
It's built in to the physics of how stars in the main sequence evolve. As they age they slowly get brighter until most of the star's hydrogen gets fused. The Sun is about halfway through that process.
I don't deny that cities can cause the local humidity to rise. Phoenix is a prime example of that. I'll even agree that that will have a small effect on global warming. But urban areas only cover about 3% of the global surface so it's not likely they can have that big an effect on the overall humidity. The point is that while water vapor can cause temperature change it can not force temperature change because it's level is dependent on temperature.
Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways to produce power. I'm not against nuclear per se but I wonder why I should pay for it when there are less expensive alternatives.
Yes, climate always changes. That doesn't mean we can't understand the reasons it's changing.
I never said we can blame 100% of Sandy on humanity. But perhaps it would have been 5% less destructive without the influence of humans on the climate. It's probably impossible to tell with any individual weather event how much it changed because of anthropogenic climate change. But by statistically analyzing weather events over time we can see how they are changing and discover trends.
I'll merely point out that the guy who wrote those FAQ's is one of the main guys in maintaining and updating one of the major GCM's. That he admits the flaws of the models is just part of being an honest scientist. The FAQ's have nothing to do with the scientific method, they are just put out there to help interested laymen understand what climate models do. Climate models are far from perfect but they do a better job than anything else we have. Just because they're not perfect doesn't mean they're 100% wrong. George Box famously wrote "essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful".
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt climate modelers will ever try to predict specific weather events. It's probably not possible more than a few weeks ahead in any event. It comes down to the difference between climate and weather. One way to look at climate is it's the statistical description of weather. Here is the World Meteorological Organization's definition of climate:
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather," or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
Weather is too chaotic to predict for any length of time but it is chaotic within bounds. Their will never be at 100C or -100C temperature recorded and there are limits to how much precipitation and wind you can get. Climate describes those bounds and to the extent the bounds shift because of anthropogenic climate change weather will shift to remain within them. Because climate describes the chaos within weather it can not be chaotic in the same way. Chaos in climate comes from such things as the variability of the Sun, long term changes in geological processes and human influences on climate but climate is mostly an energy balance problem and the secondary effects of temperature, precipitation, wind and other things will change in response to changes in the energy balance.
Climate models, especially regional models, can predict some things like likelihood of long term dryer conditions in the US southwest which appears to be happening but they will never predict with precision something like Sandy or the big Midwest drought this year, just the probability of such an event happening.
The ozone destroyers, acid rain and particulate emissions all have relatively short lifetimes in the atmosphere. All it takes to to reduce the damage they caused is to reduce or eliminate emissions of the things that caused them and they wash out in a few years (or decades in the case of ozone destroyers). That isn't the case with CO2 or more generally carbon in the active carbon cycle. Once it is there it takes thousands of years for natural processes to reduce the level significantly. That means on human time scales it's close to irreversible. Even if we do things to actively remove carbon from the carbon cycle it's hard to imagine we could do it any where nearly as fast as we put it in. Once we stop adding carbon to the cycle the changes will start slowing down after 30 or 40 years but even then it will take hundreds of years for the ice caps to catch up with the forcing. The other thing that's irreversible is species extinction. Once they're gone, they're gone.
So you're right, we have to overcome the efforts to suppress addressing the problem but that just stops it from getting worse (after a few decades). The changes already wrought won't go away anytime soon.
Of course the big climate models don't even try to predict such specific weather events in any case. At best what you can get from them is that the probability of such an event has gone up or down because of AGW. If they have predicted an increase probability for something then the fact that it occurs more often is evidence the theory is correct.
What do I really care? I'll be long dead and gone by the time it is a real problem, ...
Unless you're something like 80 years old I wouldn't count on that. As the story points out the effects are already manifesting themselves and it's not like a light switch where it's either on or off. Instead the effects just gradually keep getting worse and worse until you wake up some day and say "What happened?!". And even if we do start to do something about it there will be 30 or 40 years of continuing worsening before the climate catches up with the forcing.
Lastly the cliche "Think of the children" applies. If you don't care about yourself do you care about your children or if you have none the children of your family and friends, but maybe you don't any of those either.
Sometimes, a "scientist" has preestablished conclusions, for which he needs to find substantiating evidence.
It's true that scientists come up with hypotheses that they then test but anyone who ignores contrary evidence is not being a scientist.
The other problem with your cynicism is that scientists are (usually) smart people. They have to know that if they can find that contrary evidence to their hypothesis then others will too sooner or later. I doubt there are many scientists willing to risk their reputations and careers like that by publishing something they know to be false, especially in a hot field like climate science. To think that climate scientists could maintain a conspiracy so long with so many involved strains credulity. After all the idea that CO2 in the atmosphere affects the energy balance of the Earth is over 100 years old and intense study of the climate reaches at least back into the 1950's and 1960's.
The reality that you and I live in doesn't care what we think and will do what it will do regardless of any preconceived notions we may have. Scientists merely try to understand that reality better and have no way to make it be something it isn't.
Greenland ice cores only go back 100,000 years or so. The oldest ice cores that I'm aware of are around 800,000 years from Antarctica. The attraction of this new site is apparently the snowfall is greater in this area than in most of Antarctica and so the layers in the ice core will be thicker allowing more precision in the measurements. They're saying this is preliminary research that could eventually lead to million year old ice cores.
It's sad this got modded informative. The data that Jones deleted was from temperature stations he wasn't using in his analysis and is still available from the original sources. In fact the BEST study used data from all sources so it included the data that Jones deleted. BEST's results were very similar to Jones's. You have to remember, back when Jones deleted it that data storage was still quite expensive.
The methane and CO2 emitted because of fracking cause more than localized environmental damage.
Well, technically speaking by the definition scientists use we're in an ice age because there are still extensive ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. But I presume you're talking about what scientists refer to as a glaciation where ice sheets advance on the continents. There were never more than a minority of scientists who thought that was a possibility and it got a little attention in the 1970's but was over by 1980. From 1966 to 1980 there were around 44 papers published on global warming and only 7 published on cooling.
My thoughts exactly.
I read somewhere that the calculated confidence level was around 93% so it's not like it wasn't even close.
I know that it is physics-based dogma that solar variation cannot possibly affect climate ...
Don't be silly. Any climatologist will tell you that's the first thing you have to take into account for the climate. We've had good measurements of insolation since the 1950's and very good satellite measurements since satellites started measuring it in the 1970's (or early 1980's). The simple fact is that the Sun's output hasn't varied enough to account for all of the temperature change. At best it can account for less than 10% of it. On top of that if the warming was caused by the Sun the whole atmosphere would be warming. But in fact the stratosphere has been cooling, a signature of greenhouse gas caused warming.
Climate scientists have calculated what would happen if the Sun went into a new Maunder minimum type cycle. At best it would delay the warming by a decade or so.
Sunspot records go back to before the beginning of the thermometric era and they are a good analog for solar activity. Global temperatures during that time track pretty well with solar activity until around the middle of the 20th century. Did you know that the temperature difference between the low of the Little Ice Age and the middle of the 20th century is only about 1 degree C? It doesn't take that much temperature change to make a significant difference.
Climate scientists are well aware of the various problems with the observations and account for them with error bars and confidence levels.
Under all of that it just keeps nagging me that you can't ignore the physics. The absorption of IR by CO2 is easily demonstrated in the lab. The signature of CO2 absorption is seen when comparing top of atmosphere spectra with near surface spectra. It seems illogical to think increasing CO2 won't increase Earthly temperatures.
I try to stick to the science and name calling is not my style although occasionally I get goaded into it.
a) 16 years is certainly not long enough to measure a climate trend. There is too much noise from natural variation. If you look at graphs of global temperature you see plenty of times where temperatures dipped on longer than a decadal time scale. The long term trend is still up. Climatologists generally use 30 year running means* to describe climate. That's probably a bit arbitrary, maybe 25 years would work but I think 20 years would be getting pretty iffy.
*By definition of the World Meteorological Organization the classical period for climate is 30 years.
b) Climate models are tested by hindcasting all the time, especially using period of detailed climate knowledge since the 1950's. And again, climate models are not even really attempting to predict the last 16 years in the detail you seem to demand. It's that 30 year climate period thing again.
Satellite temperature trends aren't that much different than surface trends.
c) While summer Arctic sea ice has declined by around 2.5 million km^2 Antarctic has only grown by around 0.3 million km^2. (ref.) I'd say that is a significant difference.
Sea level is a surprisingly complex topic and not as isostatic as you might think. For instance land that was under the continental ice sheets during the last glaciation is still rebounding from the depression that the weight of all that ice caused (and land to the south that was bulged up at the same time is dropping at the same time). That affects the perception of sea level at those locations. Also for instance the sea level around Greenland is significantly higher than it otherwise would be because of the gravitational attraction of the Greenland ice sheet. IIRC on the order of 10-30 feet. So as that ice melts the sea level around Greenland will actually drop some while rising elsewhere. The same applies to the Antarctic ice sheet. Also ocean currents and prevailing winds affect sea level and changes in them will have a non-isostatic affect.
One more thing, by my understanding SLR has gone from around 1 mm/year in the early 1900's to around 2 mm/year in mid century to over 3 mm/year since the early 1990's. If you are a physicist it might be worth your time to seek out some actual recent papers by physical oceanographers on their findings about SLR.
His supposed point demonstrates his lack of understanding of what climate models do and more generally his lack of understanding of the difference between climate and weather. more than any failing climate models may have. Global warming did not stop 16 years ago. It's absurd to think it has.
The increase in elevation at New Haven probably has as much to do with post-glacial rebound as it does with bio accumulation.
Why not go directly to the source? The Met Office issued a press release in response to the Daily Mail story by David Rose that basically says he's full of it.
Interestingly Brad Werner presented a talk titled "Is Earth F**ked?" at the recently concluded AGU meeting. You can find the abstract and view the presentation here. His answer is probably unless we start seeing the kind of activism around the world like that that accompanied the civil rights movement and anti Vietnam war movement of the 1960's.
Aside from the fact that 16 years is too short a time period to meaningfully measure a temperature trend the temperature has been rising since then, just not as fast as it was in the 1980's and 1990's. You also have to consider ocean temperature change since over 90% of the Sun's energy absorbed by the Earth goes there.
In climate science the arguing about the big things has largely stopped. They've moved on to the details. They aren't getting rich over this so I'm trying to figure out where greed comes in.
If wind and solar were truly cheaper than coal and nuclear then it would not require government subsidies ...
Nuclear power requires government subsidies too. The two nuclear plants now being built in Georgia required $8.33 billion in government loan guarantees in order to get construction funding. All nuclear plants require government supplied insurance because no private insurer is willing to take the risk.
It's built in to the physics of how stars in the main sequence evolve. As they age they slowly get brighter until most of the star's hydrogen gets fused. The Sun is about halfway through that process.
salemdave
Ah, you're right, I didn't pay enough attention to the parent of your post. Sorry. It still made me laugh.
I don't deny that cities can cause the local humidity to rise. Phoenix is a prime example of that. I'll even agree that that will have a small effect on global warming. But urban areas only cover about 3% of the global surface so it's not likely they can have that big an effect on the overall humidity. The point is that while water vapor can cause temperature change it can not force temperature change because it's level is dependent on temperature.
Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways to produce power. I'm not against nuclear per se but I wonder why I should pay for it when there are less expensive alternatives.
Yes, climate always changes. That doesn't mean we can't understand the reasons it's changing.
I never said we can blame 100% of Sandy on humanity. But perhaps it would have been 5% less destructive without the influence of humans on the climate. It's probably impossible to tell with any individual weather event how much it changed because of anthropogenic climate change. But by statistically analyzing weather events over time we can see how they are changing and discover trends.
I'll merely point out that the guy who wrote those FAQ's is one of the main guys in maintaining and updating one of the major GCM's. That he admits the flaws of the models is just part of being an honest scientist. The FAQ's have nothing to do with the scientific method, they are just put out there to help interested laymen understand what climate models do. Climate models are far from perfect but they do a better job than anything else we have. Just because they're not perfect doesn't mean they're 100% wrong. George Box famously wrote "essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful".