Reducing Climate Change Uncertainty By Figuring Out Clouds 249
Most climate scientists agree that the Earth's climate is getting warmer, but models predicting the severity of the temperature rise span a (relatively) broad range. One big reason for this is the difficulty in modeling things like cloud cover and how different air masses mix and move around each other.
"Specifically, they have differences in how water-rich air at the bottom of the atmosphere gets mixed with the layers immediately above it. In some cases, this mixing increases rapidly as the temperature rises, effectively drying out the lower atmosphere and suppressing cloud formation there. This in turn would enhance the warming effect. In others, the increase in mixing is more gradual, limiting the impact of warming on clouds. The former produces a higher climate sensitivity; the latter a lower one. ... So, the authors turned to the atmosphere, using data to determine the relative importance of these processes (abstract). In the end, they find that the models that dry out the lower atmosphere more quickly are likely to get the process right. And, in these models, the mixing increases the drying rate in the lower atmosphere by about five to seven percent for each Kelvin the Earth's temperature increases. In contrast, the rate of evaporation, which adds moisture to the lower atmosphere, only increases by two percent for each Kelvin. Thus, the lower atmosphere dries out, cloud formation there is suppressed, and the planet warms even further. How much more will it warm? Quite a bit."
meta stable (Score:2, Insightful)
As a physicist I do not take modeling of the atmosphere as we understood it now serious.
The atmosphere is too much a chaotic system with many (meta-) stable states.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
the problem with climate "science" is that you have exactly one experiment.
Re: (Score:3)
So is quantum physics, but that hasn't stopped a century of physicists from using statistical methods to work around the giant clusterfuck that lurks below the planck length.
I had this exact same thing told to me by an undergrad physicist, so I pointed him at my sister who's a post-doc climate researcher and promptly schooled the guy on how its done (And pointed out to him why his knowledge of fluid dynamics was sorely lacking). He's not a skeptic anymore.
For a less confrontational approach, go into your li
Re: (Score:2)
Saying that climate is chaotic and hard to predict shouldn't be controversial. It's pretty conceited to suggest that anyone who doesn;t agree with you needs to "read some of the research" and "come back with an informed opinion", when it appears that they themselves lack the informed opinion they require of others.
Becoming informed is more than just reading X scientific journals espousing a certain conclusion, and changing your mind to that conclusion.
If your sister has some valuable insight due to her exp
Insane Cloud Posse (Score:4, Funny)
Fucking Clouds, How Do They Work?
Re: (Score:3)
They form unexpectatly. They rain down suddenly.
So it is here when you look at it, and suddenly it's gone.
They insulate. They also reflect.
So which effect is bigger?
While forming they are simply water vapour (a potent greenhouse gas).
While forming they extract a great deal of heat out of the ocean. How much exactly depends on many factors, e.g. do they form over night or durin day time.
Re: (Score:2)
They form unexpectatly. They rain down suddenly.
So it is here when you look at it, and suddenly it's gone.
They insulate. They also reflect.
So which effect is bigger?
While forming they are simply water vapour (a potent greenhouse gas).
While forming they extract a great deal of heat out of the ocean. How much exactly depends on many factors, e.g. do they form over night or durin day time.
Thank you Sheldon Cooper!
Re: (Score:2)
Just Sheldon for you!
Re: (Score:2)
The sun'll come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow
There'll be sun!
Re: (Score:2)
Fucking Clouds, How Do They Work?
Why do we need to figure out how they work? The science is settled. [npr.org] And since it's settled we don't need to do anymore work.
As noted previously, denying this for anyone in this thread makes you a climate change denier. Especially for those that have pointed out in the past that: We don't know how clouds operate fully in the biosphere, how much of an impact the sun has, total and partial fluctuations of various gravity effects, cosmic ray's and their impacts, and so on.
Models vs models (Score:5, Insightful)
The study assumes that the models that show lower amounts of warming are the "less accurate" ones, and the models with higher warming are going to be "more accurate." Eventually, that is.
The problem is that all of the climate models that predict AGW have been wrong, and the ones that show the least amount of actual warming are the ones that are least wrong at this point. So their solution is to come up with yet another one-dimensional computer model that shifts the possible warming a few decades into the future.
The study also suggests that the water vapor in the lower atmosphere will more or less migrate up - which is not happening, according to actual observations by satellites.
It's like the old AGW models, which predicted a "tropical hot spot" a few miles up that would happen due to AGW - and which never appeared.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"The study assumes"
No, the study concludes.
This political debate waged in selective pseudo-scientific microquibbles is silly. It's really pretty simple.
1) You can trust the process and presume that if the research scientists are converging on the basics, they're probably on the right track.
2) You can prove them wrong - on scientific turf, not the comments section of a news article - and earn yourself a nobel prize and the undying thanks of millions of concerned citizens
3) You can shut the fuck up.
Re: (Score:3)
2) You can prove them wrong - on scientific turf, not the comments section of a news article - and earn yourself a nobel prize and the undying thanks of millions of concerned citizens
The problem is that 2) requires time. With sufficiently massaged paleoclimate data you can conclude just about anything. But it takes decades to gather high quality satellite data to confirm or falsify the claims made.
Re: (Score:3)
Which would be fine if people where "massaging the data". Fortunately theres no evidence of that.
As my sister (A post-doc climate researcher) pointed out to me once , her profession is filled with tens of thousands of researchers desparately looking for that one piece of evidence that would show that the whole fields got it wrong and theres nothing to look for. Unfortunately in the century since scientists started worring about CO2 and infra-red, that evidence has failed to materialize.
There is no conspirac
Re: (Score:3)
By "look for" read "worry about". The first guy that comes up with evidence that global warming isn't happening is going to get a Nobel Prize. And since Fourier first demonstrated CO2's greenhouse effects in the 1800s (And promptly started the scientific community flipping out about the greenhouse effect and the industrial revolution), nothing has arisen to demonstrate that the physics is wrong. Unfortunately to get that Nobel prize it would require some pretty massive evidence that some unseen mechanism is
Re: (Score:2)
But global warming is not a binary state. I grant that there is compelling evidence for the existence of global warming. What I don't grant is that there is evidence that we need to do anything about global warming now.
There are plenty of people with
Re: (Score:2)
Do you know what feedback loop is?
Evidence. There's no supporting evidence for your concern that a feedback loop exists.
We KNOW a fast rise in temperatures is extremely dangerous to life diversity on Earth, which is essential to our own survival.
Life diversity is not essential to our own survival. We depend instead on a rather small number of species, both for direct benefit and to sustain an ecosystem.
We KNOW the atmosphere has a feedback component and a lot of inertia
No, we don't. Instead we KNOW that heat radiates as the fourth power of temperature which is a strong negative feedback mechanism.
Your sister doesn't work in a field with tens of thousands of researchers.
Really? How many, according to you? Tens of thousands sound about right to me.
Sounds right to someone without a clue. For example, most of the research about which climate change research and advocacy is based come
Re: (Score:2)
You wouldn't have to show that all the thermometers are wrong. You would just have to accurately predict that the temperature of the planet would eventually go down, exactly when and by how much. If you could accurately predict climate, and your predictions show that it was going down, then you just disproved global warming. Maybe this still counts as climate change because the temperature went up a few degrees and then back down.
All you'd have to show is that the recent increase in temperature was tempo
Re:Models vs models (Score:5, Insightful)
2) You can prove them wrong
Prove a negative? So far reality is proving them wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Proving someone wrong is not "proving a negative".
If I claim that "all cats are black", all you have to do to prove me wrong is to provide evidence of a cat that is not black.
If someone claims to know what the climate is going to be in the future, then they will get proven wrong if their predictions do not hold up. If their predictions are sufficiently vague, then they don't even need to be proven wrong to be dismissed.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem with models and predictions is that eventually you get to compare them to real world observations. They become accurate or inaccurate based on reality. If you want to enact social and economic change, you make sure your models predict catastrophe. You gobble up any funding provided to you, and use it to predict more catastrophe with more certainty. The problem is that reality will eventually intrude, and the game will be over.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
which is entirely correct given the experimental data and known facts of physics.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
As an attacking AC you don't deserve an answer, but I'll give you one. My daughter hasn't had to to a paper on AGW, but she had an interesting little thing happen to her master's thesis. She was using data by previous students, and some of it didn't look quite right. It's not that it didn't match her desired conclusions, it's that certain proportions didn't match what she knew as normal. So she went into the archives, pulled a sample of the original materials, and took the data herself. Whoever had tak
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying, but for sake of convenience I'll give my working definitions of a few terms :
"Hypothesis" is a "neat idea," generally with the intent to refine into a theory. "String Theory" seems to never really be testable against the real world, but I guess it's shorter to pronounce than "String Hypothesis." Still I suspect that the thing string theorists would most enjoy is a testable prediction, so they really could experiment.
"Theory" is a proposal or proposed model, along w
Re: (Score:2)
No, he'd lose his job if the science was bad.
A math teacher would lose his job if he taught kids that 2+2=5. This is not because there is a political agenda by the pro 2+2=4 crowd. It's because that if you *do* teach 2+2=5, that your math skills probably suck.
I am not saying you are a shitty scientist if your research shows AGW doesn't exist. It's just that most good research currently doesn't show this. If your research does show that AGW is nonexistent, and it is well done research, maybe you would ge
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What are you talking about? Neglecting transient fluctuations (which are admittedly large enough to partially mask the still-small trend), global warming has been drastically worse that the worst-case scenarios predicted several decades ago predicted, probably in large part because human fossil fuel consumption has also been exceeding the worst-case scenario assumptions. Just because we haven't yet reached the predicted "apocalypse" doesn't mean we can't see it coming - it was never predicted to start to
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point nobody in the scientific community is predicting global warming - you don't predict it's going to start raining when you're already getting wet. The evidence is in, GW is real and getting rapidly worse.
How many degrees per decade again? And why is that considered "getting rapidly worse"? Global warming denying is not the only anti-scientific belief system causing waves here. The catastrophic climate change people are another such problem.
Re: (Score:2)
That qualifies as getting rapidly worse because ecologies take time to adapt, and the rate of change is already exceeding anything in the geological record, including past climate changes events associated with widespread extinctions. And in case you hadn't noticed our ecology isn't currently doing all that great to begin with. Remember, if the bees all die, so do we. Ditto grass, and probably even sharks, etc.etc.etc. Anything that shoves the current ecology permanently out of balance is likely to caus
Re: (Score:2)
and the rate of change is already exceeding anything in the geological record, including past climate changes events associated with widespread extinctions
Like the asteroid impact that marks the end of the Cretacious? That climate change event probably took a fraction of a second to go from a rock in deep space to dinosaur ending fireball.
Re: (Score:2)
I think what he is saying is that AGW can't be the climate changing event causing the highest rate of change. One would expect a large meteor strike to be far more rapid a change than one that takes centuries to cause a couple of degrees difference in temperature.
Maybe a large meteor strike took thousands of years to do all of it's damage, but it would presumably change the climate much more quickly than AGW.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Models vs models (Score:4, Informative)
The study assumes that the models that show lower amounts of warming are the "less accurate" ones, and the models with higher warming are going to be "more accurate.
The study "assumes" nothing of the sort. It compared the differences in the way different climate models handle water vapor and cloud formation and found the ones that dry out the lower atmosphere more quickly do a better job of modeling real world observations.
As far as all climate models being wrong that probably has more to do with your misunderstanding of what climate models are designed to do than it does with the climate models themselves. As George Box said "All models are wrong but some are useful." Climate models are at best crude representations of the atmosphere, partly because it's impossible* at this point to model things on a small enough scale to capture everything, but they're still better than any other method we have.
*Impossible because of limitations in computing horsepower. Current models use grid scales of around 100 km x 100 km x 1 km vertical x 30 minutes per step. [ucar.edu]
But I heard (Score:5, Funny)
"the science is settled".
How can there be any uncertainty when "the science is settled"?
The science is settled: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9047642 [npr.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Good Science tends to be rather aware of its limitations.
Bad Science Journalism tends towards dogmatic assertions of absolutism just as much as many religious folk.
"Error bars", "p-values", "uncertainty values/ranges" are the norm in Science, not the exception.
Here you're juxtaposing two separate issues. First "the science is settled" appears to be a remark or jab at the idea that the overwhelming consensus among relevant Scientists and relevant peer-reviewed studies is that global average temps are increa
IPCC AGW predictions FAILED (Score:4, Informative)
Graph [clivebest.com] shows 1990 IPCC predicitons with REALITY. There is a range of values predicted by the IPCC and the "settled consensus of climate scientitst" and then there is reality which isn't in the range they selected. They are WRONG, 100% WRONG. They made their predictions, gave a range, told everyone to stop debating, and were wrong, period.
Go ahead back to your church of AGW and keep tithing and singing hymns or whatever else you do there. The rest of us used failed scientific predictions as PROOF they were wrong.
Spin away at those facts. Attack me, attack the graph, pretend I didn't post this, whatever. The fact remains the IPCC FAILED no matter how you want to try and look at it.
Re: (Score:3)
Furthermore. The measurements of surface which are prlotted are now known to have problems, in particular, underestimating the polar regions which have sparse data and more heating, and heat going into the deeper ocean. A number of peer-reviewed recent analyses and data has shown that the polar heating has been underestimated, as has the heat going to deeper ocean. There is no mystery or problem.
There are zillions of pre
Re: (Score:2)
OK, what are the expected sizes of decadal-level fluctuations around those predictions?
That's a good question. You should go look it up. The answer will surprise you.
Re: (Score:3)
Don't know if you've ever compared the three amounts of energy, (1) solar energy incident on the earth in a year, (2) heat of fusion of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps (i.e., energy to melt them, assuming they are at 0C and frozen) and (3) the amount of energy required to heat the oceans by 1 degree C. The ratios are roughly 1 : 1.8 : 0.9. (My arithmetic: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/numbers-that-were-larger-than-i-had-imagined/ [wordpress.com] )
For me, this was simultaneously stupefying, scary, and anno
You're Conflating Climate Activists with Climate S (Score:2)
Your label "global warmers" puts non-scientist activists (e.g. McKibben, who really does push for what can reasonably be called decivilization) and the actual scientists (e.g.. Hansen, who doesn't) in the same category. I am not a close observer of the debate, so I cannot say what, if anything, other real scientists, such as Mann, propose, but a meaningful debate requires the two controversies--is there a problem vs. what to do about it if there is--be separated.
Re:IPCC AGW predictions FAILED (Score:4, Informative)
That graph is out of date:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/2010-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/ [realclimate.org]
Re:But I heard (Score:5, Insightful)
People making irresponsible and extreme statements about climate need to be disavowed by scientists or the science itself will lose credibility with the public. To a large extent, it already has -- and deservedly so. Get it back by being honest and open and by staying away from politics. It's going to take a really long time.
And, yeah, I understand uncertainty and error bars. When the actual, measured temperatures are outside the error bars, the models need to be declared to be incorrect. My understanding is that this should happen within the next few years for many models, if measured warming trends continue.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
IPCC scientists are occasionally under political pressure. The pressure has always been to "tone down" their predictions of the future and consequences of global warming.
Re: (Score:3)
If you drop a feather it will hit the ground. The science is settled on that. Predicting the exact path the feather will take, now that's a much more complicated challenge.
Re: (Score:2)
wrong, a feather may fly upward due to thermal or wind, and may land somewhere off the ground. The science is not settled on that either
Re: (Score:2)
Where else will the feather land? In orbit around earth?
Are we counting a patio or a roof or a lake as not "the ground"? I don't think Immerman was claiming that a feather will always land on a specific type of ground (e.g. soil), but rather that it can't stay in the air perpetually.
Re: (Score:2)
There are some big picture things about climate change that are settled. Changes in the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere affect the amount of energy stored internally in Earth's geophysical system. The increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is primarily due to human burning of fossil fuels. Those and a few other things are pretty well settled. What isn't fully settled is lots of details that tweak the primary effects. This study is an example of that, comparing how different models h
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately it isn't, no. If it were, then you would have seen the warming trend continue past 1997. Unfortunately it's stopped even though CO2 has continued to increase. This is something of a problem for your hypothesis, isn't it, especially as we're now over half way through the standard 30 year period of significance.
In my view, when people think something's settled and the real-world evidence flatly contradicts it, it isn't fucking settl
Re: (Score:2)
The warming trend DID continue past 1997 (which is a cherry picked year, to see why just look at the graph below).
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/2010-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/ [realclimate.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The warming trend has continued. The slope is not as steep in atmospheric warming as it was in the 1980's and 1990's but it isn't flat. The oceans where over 90% of the warming goes are still warming. You have to look at warming in the atmosphere, oceans and land surface together to get the complete picture.
Re: (Score:2)
A is pretty easily shown by the evidence available. B and c are conjecture for which the evidence is - thus far - shaky at best. D is quite far from certain.
First of all, we can't even state what the temperature of the Earth has been prior to about the 1970s when weather satellites began large-scale measurements. Prior to that, all we have are ground station measurements (which are terribly incomplete and imprecise and don't match up with the satellite data), tree ring data (which is even more imprecise, mo
Re: (Score:2)
Certainly, we don't have the kind of precision necessary to provide for sub-degree delta changes over the past 100+ years. The further back we go, the less precision we can have, meaning we have no idea just how "unprecedented" any of this is or whether any of this warming can be considered normal.
Very accurate thermometers have been available since the 1700's so it just took having enough weather stations around the world to form a coherent picture of global temperature. That happened in the mid-1800's. It is not necessary to have accuracy better than +/- 1 degree to measure "sub-degree" differences in temperatures over many measurements. For example in baseball a player at bat either makes a hit or an out (walks, etc. don't count as at bats) so they either get a 1 or a zero. Yet batting average
Re: (Score:2)
It also doesn't mean we shouldn't be working to stop obviously damaging emissions (such as those from coal fire power plants that destroy the local environment and create dangerous conditions for humans and other animals).
Nail on head. This is what frustrates me so much about the whole AGW argument. It's a red herring.
We can work on cleaner energy, plant more trees, rebuild the soils, reduce pollution, reduce consumption. We can do all that without ever giving ONE FUCK about AGW.
We have a pretty good idea about some things that would give us cleaner air and cleaner water. We don't need to argue about 1 degree Celsius in 100 years. We don't need to sample ice cores or count tree rings to know that it's a good idea to not
Re: (Score:2)
op all wrong (Score:4, Informative)
the abstract doesn't say they used data, it says they identified a math procedure that caused variation between the models
so, what you have are a lot of complex computer models that vary in output; the authors show that about half the variation is due to cloud mixing
however, we have no idea if the models are in fact accurate, other then Fig 1b of Fyfe etal, which suggests that the models are in fact NOT accurate, so it doesn't matter if you lower the variation between them.
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Climate%20model%20results/over%20estimate.pdf [ed.ac.uk]
I would remind people of history: in the early 1800s, people realized that CO2 absorbs IR, and the late 1800s, they realized that humans were actually putting out enough CO2 to make a diff
Then, around 1900, someone pointed out that the atmosphere is optically thick in the IR (if you could see the color "IR" it would be pitch black all the time), so an increase in CO2 shouldn't matter
This *scientific consensus* lasted untill the 1950s, when people realized that it is emission from the outer atmosphere that matttrs....
so, for 50 years, there was a consensus that CO2 human warming was hooey
Human Based Climate Change vs Climate Change Title (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop Using Climate Change to disguise an argument about human based climate change.
Nobody needs to argue that the climate changes.
These globalists who want a revenue stream for world government employed on you, your kids via carbon taxes always use this stupid, really irritating title on this so called paid research of theirs on human climate change.
Besides, I thought human based climate change was now a fact, and there wasn't any uncertainty?
Meanwhile low temperature records world wide are in the lead 2 to
Re:Human Based Climate Change vs Climate Change Ti (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, but the Sun has everything to do with climate change when combined with the variable orbit geometry of the Earth around the Sun.
We will reenter the next ice age and Canada will again get covered by a kilometer or two of ice and all existing shipping harbors will become dry land.
It will probably take another 50,000 years, but it will happen on the 110,000 year cycle that has repeated at least a couple dozen times now.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, but the Sun has everything to do with climate change when combined with the variable orbit geometry of the Earth around the Sun.
This is absolutely true -- over millions of years. It does not explain the warming trend in the past century. Your mode of argument is like saying "all will eventually die of old age, therefore automobile accidents don't kill people." There can be more than driver of climate change, and the timescale over which a driver of change operates is very important. Even if car accidents are less likely to kill you than old age, the fact that they kill you at 19 years old rather than 90 makes a big difference.
Fou
Re: (Score:2)
You are right that 4 degrees Centigrade over a hundred years might be bad for current citizens and that begs another question when it comes to food and water supplies.
Given the world's climate change and the chance that it is cataclysmically caused by humans results in the question as to whether we have exceeded the number of humans that the earth can support in a stable manner.
Try to get a resolution through the UN on that one to reduce population! Trying to reduce man made effects, like not enough water,
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting conundrum. The left wing environmentalists want us to scale back on energy use, which effectively means we cannot support as many people on the earth as we have now. The alternative, they claim, is that doing nothing means we'll have problems growing enough food (due to climate change side-effects) to support the number of people we now have on the earth.
So do something that condemns people to die of starvation NOW to prevent the possibility that people will die of starvation in the FUTURE, mayb
Re: (Score:3)
No one is claiming that we should do something that kills people to combat warming. We should use energy more efficiently and get energy from sources other than burning fossil fuels (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels) to cut carbon dioxide emissions. We can do that and also support more people on the planet.
I think misconceptions about what we plan to do to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions is the reason most people don't agree with cutting emissions... they think it means that they will have to do wit
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't though, has it. The trend is flat for the last 17 years. Also, you're discounting the positive effects of warming and increased Co2, which are substantial. They're not included because they hurt the "crisis" narrative and the crisis narrative feeds huge sums of government money to academic institutions, NGOs and "green economy" start-ups.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In my view using the 1990 First Assessment Report to compare to observations is just cherry picking. Use one of the last two reports (AR4 & AR5) if you want to compare the current state of the art science to observations. Or don't you believe in scientific progress?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it's cherry picking to use the 1990 report, but when you use the 2001 report you'll just say that the models are not made for the "short term". When the "long term" is finally the present, you just revert to saying it's "cherry picking" or "the science is MUCH BETTER today" (but of course not verifiable because they are not made for "the short term").
Add to this expressions like "extreme weather events" that some climate shill found either in a fortune cookie or a horoscope.
All of this is the fallout
Denialist Trolls (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You mean like where the next IPCC draft has quietly cut the 30-year project of how much the world will warm from 0.4-1.0C (previous draft) to 0.3-0.7C in the final draft, also saying that warming is more likely to be at the lower end of the range over the next 30 years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
What makes you think they don't already do the calculations using the Kelvin scale and just convert to Celsius for reporting the results?
Re:First thing they need to do (Score:4, Insightful)
Is to change to using an absolute scale of temperature like Kelvin
Not really... they could have said "degrees" and it would have held true for all parts of the world using Celsius (including scientists in the US). The Kelvin bit is just silly, as Kelvin just sets 0 at a different point along the same scale as Celsius (0 being no energy vs 0 being freezing point of water). When you're measuring the temperature delta, Kelvin vs Celsius is meaningless (373.15 - 273.15 = 100 - 0).
Re: (Score:2)
The Kelvin and Celsius temperature scales use the same sized degrees but Kelvin is an absolute temperature scale in that it's tied to absolute zero while Celsius is relative to the freezing and boiling points of water at standard atmospheric conditions. Since Kelvin is an absolute temperature scale it's more useful when comparing different temperatures. For instance a 1% increase in the average temperature of the Earth would be about 2.85 Kelvin. You couldn't use the Celsius scale to calculate that direc
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and if anyone were presenting their results in percentages, that would be implicitly deceptive. But that would at worst be a reporting problem, and have nothing to do with the science.
Re: (Score:2)
And here we have exactly what's wrong with this debate. An utter ignoramus declaring that very intelligent, specifically informed people who have spent decades refining a process to get useful data are "clowns" on the basis that another process that was designed to yield better results on a different variable doesn't yield results quite as accurate on the primary variable.
Congratulations on being everything wrong with science discussion.
Re: (Score:2)
Come on, re-read the summary. If they selected based on cloud accuracy, that makes cloud coverage the primary variable and temperature a secondary one. The ones that try to predict clouds do worse at temperature.
That is to say, I have no idea what you're even trying to say, other than going for a chance to misuse the word "cretin"
Re: (Score:3)
They're reporting differences in temperatures, in this case "climate sensitivity", the amount of temperature change predicted for a given change in some other quantity (such as atmospheric concentrations of CO2). When discussing temperature intervals, Kelvin and degrees Celsius are used interchangeably, because 1 K = 1 degree C. They only differ (by a fixed offset) when discussing specific temperatures, since they set the zero point in a different place.
P.S. It's 2014 and I still can't type a degree symbol
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Who knew the Earth's name was Kelvin?
Oh.
It's all just a matter of degree....
Re: (Score:2)
Except Kelvins don't have degrees. I guess they didn't finish school.
Seriously though since Kelvins are an absolute measurement tied to absolute zero it was decided at the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967-1968 to drop the degree and just call them Kelvins.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
we've just learned that there are huge reservoirs of unfrozen water under greenland ice sheet, and for the second year antarctic sea ice has reached a record high to the befuddlement of climate modelers (and a ship full of them is stuck in ice), and yet you make absurd statement as if we had completely accurate ice inventory.
The models are failing, they didn't even account for the dominant greenhouse gas on earth, which is water and which is far too complicated to model with current technology. And linking
Re:Chemtrail are working (Score:5, Insightful)
The shameless ignorance is strong with this one.
Do you really believe that climatologists have IGNORED water for 50 years? Oh, "oops we forgot it again"? WTF? It's like asserting that the entire profession of internal medicine forgetting that kidneys exist because they're "too complicated to model" and assume animals are all kidney and urine free.
The very paper from the original article, peer reviewed and published in the top journal on the planet, is exactly about this very problem of testing which of the many climate models best deal with the complex feedback and feedforwards with water and clouds by using experimental data.
Here's a hint. The people who do this for a living know much much much much more than you and I do about it. I have a modest idea how much more the pros know about it (I have a PhD in physics and am acquainted with the author) and I also have the feeling that in fact however much more I think they understand, they are probably even beyond that.
Re: (Score:2)
you are the ignorant one, water vapor is too hard to model and the admission of that is readily available. nevertheless, it is by far the dominant greenhouse gas on this world. by the way, I've studied geophysics, have you?
Re: (Score:3)
nevertheless, it is by far the dominant greenhouse gas on this world.
Dominant in the sense that it has the biggest total impact. However, because water stays in vapor form only for a few days (9 days on average), that huge impact serves as nothing more than a mere amplifier of other influences. CO2 on the other hand stays in the atmosphere for centuries before it gets removed through natural processes.
Re: (Score:2)
Predicting weather is different than predicting climate. Even if you take something completely random like rolling a die, I can;t predict what the next roll will be, but I can predict very accurately that if I roll the die millions of times that the expected value of all the rolls will be very close to 3.5.
I am not saying that climate can be predicted very accurately. What I am saying is that we don't necessarily need to predict weather accurately in order to predict climate accurately.
I use to get a channel when I had cable PCN, Pennsylvania News Channel, they would have a 15 minute segment from Penn States weather center, they use computer models, but they also use there own knowledge of weather and often times go with what they believe would happen, and 90% of the time if they went with the computer model it would be wrong.
Computers do what h
"Paid" (Score:5, Informative)
Those "record breaking massive storms" were, overall, not much worse than average. A couple of large ones, but they got large mostly because there weren't that many medium-sized storms along their paths. Meanwhile, we didn't seeing much of anything in the Atlantic (record-breaking "dud"), and areas outside of that one patch of Pacific Ocean were pretty average.
On the "paid" issue:
You do realize that even the guy who wrote that study you mention says that the reporter who wrote the story pretty much lied their ass off, right?
The short form: The actual study took any group that published anything at all that might, maybe, sorta could question AGW. Even one article or study. Then they took the entire budget of each organization and added it up. That's how they got that $900 million plus.
The actual amount that could actually, sorta, maybe be tied to anti-AGW funded studies or articles? About enough to fund Greenpeace for week and a half. If you counted things like studies showing that people don't like paying extra taxes for green energy stuff that doesn't actually work.
On the other hand, the "green" businesses are funding all sorts of sketchy "science" to support their industries. Like the guy who makes money off of "carbon remediation," who funded the really stupid "expedition"/tourism group that's currently being evacuated from their ice-trapped Russian ship.
Re: (Score:2)
"If I should only be talking about climate and not weather, then why do all of the alarmists tout about extreme weather?"
To preserve my blood pressure, I will assume that you are actually well meaning, and honestly want to learn and you are just temporarily ignorant.
Weather is the consequence of climate. Weather in North Dakota in the winter is measurably different than summer in Miami because they have differing climates. The specific weather on any one day changes with timescales related to the atmosphe
Re:There is no uncertainty (Score:4, Informative)
Shaky grounds? Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases cause warming. We are emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year into the atmosphere. The warming caused by these emissions was predicted over 100 years ago. We are now observing that predicted warming. Which one of these is the least bit shaky?
I don't understand what you mean about no uncertainty. There is always some uncertainty in science. No measurement is ever exact, and science never proves anything beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Based on the trends in the various components of Milankovitch Cycles we should be cooling now as we were for the past 6,000+ years. But we're not.
Re: (Score:2)
No, you're a fucking idiot. 1000 samples is plenty for many purposes, if they are good and random.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Discrete mathematics" -- I don't think that word means what you think it means.
(I know a whole lot more about discrete mathematics than I do about statistics or climatology.
Look it up on wikipedia, see if you see very much at all about sampling theory or statistics.
Yes, they DO mention discrete probability, but it is a tiny corner of the whole.)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it isn't exactly a flat line. It's just warming more slowly than in the 1980's and 1990's. But if you knew anything about climate models you'd know that they aren't expected to predict anything on 10 or 15 year time scales.
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously climate scientists failed their Philosophy of Science class, as they seem to regularly mistake a trend for a law. Worse, they actually think their models have skill, despite the fact that in order to have any ski