More Hot Weather For Southern California, Says UCLA Study 218
The L.A. Times reports on a study by UCLA climate researchers who conclude, based on supercomputer analysis of a model "2,500 times more precise than previous climate models for the region" that the area around L.A. will experience more (and more extreme) hot spells in decades to come. From the article: "The study, released Thursday, is the first to model the Southland's complex geography of meandering coastlines, mountain ranges and dense urban centers in high enough resolution to predict temperatures down to the level of micro climate zones, each measuring 2 1/4 square miles. The projections are for 2041 to 2060. Not only will the number of hot days increase, but the study found that the hottest of those days will break records, said Alex Hall, lead researcher on the study by UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability."
Chaotic systems (Score:2, Informative)
Precision is not the answer. Lorenz pointed that out rather a long time ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton_Lorenz [wikipedia.org]
Terminology... (Score:3)
Which, of course, does not mean [agilent.com] "2,500 times more accurate."
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Climate models when run on a global scale typically use a grid size of 100x100 km (at the equator). In this case they ran them on a regional scale with a grid size of about 2.5 sq. miles which is about 2.4x2.4 km. That's where the increased precision comes from. It's easier to take in the vagaries of local geography into account at that scale.
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"2,500 times more precise"
Which, of course, does not mean [agilent.com] "2,500 times more accurate."
metrology != meteorology
lol
precision = true positives / (true positives + false positives)
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Enough! (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont care if this shit is accurate or not, I am going to attempt to do what is right, not what is cheaper.
History has proven that cheaper is not better for us, for the environment, or for our future.
If it were, we wouldnt worry about lakes catching on fire, cancer eating our bodies, and carbons heating up the earth (this is true BTW, look at historical evidence, and not just 50 years ago, more like 5 million years).
So shut the fuck up, make your decision, and die in your environment, or live in it.
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Getting rid of all the ACs would be a good 1st step.
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Hopefully they'll be the primary targets from the increased Predator visitations.
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This is just complete nonsense. If you want a nice place to live, then keeping "lakes" from "catching on fire" (which apparently happens all the time in environmentalist doomsday fantasy worlds) is "cheaper" (or, more accurately, more valuable) than the alternative. On the other hand, if you're struggling to live at all, maybe you let the lakes take care of themselves.
"Cheaper" is always what we get. When wealth is abundant (and thus "cheaper"), we can afford environmental improvements. The more wealthy
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There is not a confirmed single cause for the Little Ice Age which started before and finished well after the Sporer and Maunder Minima. Volcanos are likely factors as well as reduced insolation.
If there ZERO GHGs in the atmosphere, the Earth would be too cold for life as we know it ( well, too cold for us ), even if our orbit were perfectly regular and if insolation was constant at the max irradiation we've experienced in the last few millennia.
If we are able to cause a significant change to the concentrat
Experience (Score:2, Interesting)
I have lived in SoCal all my life and there was a period in the 70's when pollution was rampant to the point you didn't trust any air you couldn't see, and even warm says resulted in eye and lung pain from acids in the air. It also served as a microclimate greenhouse effect.
We now have more than double the cars, more than 4x the degree of traffic jams, a lot less pollution that is feelable or seeable. But the greenhouse effect is still about the same. Greenhouse gases in order of magnitude are:
Water (dihyd
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You SoCal-er's problem is you keep leeching water off the rest of us, rather than solving your water crisis problems yourself. Up here in NorCal, the only time we've got a 'water crisis' is because our local water companies sell us down a river (or canal as it is) to you guys, then try and jack up our rates claiming that capacity doesn't meet demand. I remember before we all got shafted on water metering and even when we had a full resevoir they were putting us on alternate day water rationing for our lawns
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That is actually the same problem as California. We also farm deserts and prairies like the Midwest, which uses far more water than the population centers. USDA indicates that water consumption by farming is 80% nationally and 90% in western states. To make a positive impact on water use, the lowest hanging fruit (heh) is more efficient water use in farming. ...or we could all become vegetarians.
2041? After 2038, we all go back to 1901 temps (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem [wikipedia.org]
And a lot of folks won't give a rat's ass anyway, if an overheated LA burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.
Call it Urban Improvement.
Why is everything going backwards? (Score:2)
Why do they get to have all the fun? I was looking forward to seeing global warming hit Death Valley hard, and setting a new high, and breaking it's own record for hottest recorded temperature, ever.
Instead, the deserts have been having pretty mild summers for the past few years, as well as unusually large amounts of snow. And instead, a spot like L.A., which is 72F degrees year-round and only gets out of that long-sleve weather te
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Easy: You need clouds (or at least humidity) to bottle up the heat. If it's always clear at night the ground can cool down despite all those greenhouse gases because water vapor (the strongest greenhouse gas) is low. That's why it gets cool during the night even in hot deserts.
Suspicious dates (Score:2)
Why not predict something verifiable* like say 2020? Or, given this astounding accuracy, 2014?
* verifiable during the career of the guy releasing this study. As it is now the results seem to be designed not to put the author's reputation on the line.
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Hansen's 1982 predictions were pretty good, only 30% too low, given that quantitative climate science was in its infancy back then.
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How does this relate to my question?
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Hansen did predict something verifiable 30 years out and it was verified.
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You are pointlessly belligerent and an AC to boot. I read the article and if this man can predict relative climate changes statistically(e.g. E(X days above 95 in 2020)=...) in 2041 he'd better be able to predict something similar for earlier years. If he can't.... well, then the mathematics are almost certainly against him. So I rather think you haven't the slightest idea of what you are commenting on.
I hope I am not alive by then! (Score:2)
I hope I am dead way before those years! :P
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No, I want to see it. Pass the popcorn. Hollywood's latest thrillers have nothing on it.
and fusion power is forever 20 years away... (Score:2)
I am not going to quibble over whether their predictions are right or not, all I have to say is, way to take the safe road ... a generation out meaning no one will remember the prediction.
If you cannot predict accurate within five years why should I believe you can project out thirty to forty or believe that accuracy is better?
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If you cannot predict accurate within five years why should I believe you can project out thirty to forty or believe that accuracy is better?
Because weather has natural cycles (like ENSO) over a few years that average out over decades.
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Maybe because they're only predicting an increase of 2-5 degrees in average temperatures(depending on region) 30 years out? That suggests that five years out the average increase would be at most 0.3 to 0.8 degrees, and probably much less since changes are accelerating. Add in the fact that the error bars are unlikely to be much smaller (since it sounds like they're using global climate predictions to drive a regional climate simulation) and any predictions would be lost in the noise.
Basically they're say
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Oh, and fusion power is estimated at roughly $80 billion worth of research away - and (inflation-adjusted) estimates have held pretty close to that since the beginning (i.e. projected cost-to completion has been falling more-or-less in line with cumulative funding). The problem is that funding rates have been falling steadily almost from the beginning, so even though progress is being made, the speed of progress is falling fast enough that time-to-completion is holding steady.
2,500? (Score:2)
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They didn't say "more accurate", they said "more precise". Not the same thing at all....
As an example, a temperature increase of 15 degrees, plus or minus 1 degree is much more precise than a temperature increase of 15 degrees plus or minus 10 degrees.
However, if the temperature actually increases 1 degree, neither the more precise nor the less precise number would
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Note they said precise (=detailed) - not accurate (=correct), the two are independent concepts. As an example imagine you have two tape measures - one is marked only at every foot, the other also has markings at every inch. The second tape is 12 times as precise as the first. If you were measuring area that precision would square, for an area measured in inches is 144 times as precise as one measured in feet.
In this case their simulation essentially has regional "pixels" covering 2-1/4 square miles - if
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Re:As a "denier"..... (Score:4, Informative)
It's all been done, starting 30 years ago, and the results are in. It happened exactly as you wrote, except for
8. Begin a massive disinformation campaign to avoid having to act on the results.
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Re:As a "denier"..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, the old denier tactic of mixing up serious science with bogus science reporting in the mass media.
There is a reason why there is a "mainstream" in science. It's fact based, it's boring, and it's usually correct.
Uh huh (Score:2)
And our local meteorologists were predicting a colder than usual winter last November; and it was the 3rd warmest on record. But sure, I'll trust these new awesome predictions that go decades into the future.
Phhhttttt!
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You're exhibiting your lack of education about the difference between weather and climate.
I know it's all relative and stuff, but... (Score:2)
FTA sidebar:
In Austin, a year with only 4.6 days exceeding 95 degrees would be a miracle indeed!
In conclusion, downtown L.A., here I come!
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Cali's weather is pretty moderate. The summers there are much nicer than virtually everywhere else in the US.
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You're talking about the coast. Inland in the Mohave Desert, Death Valley and the Central Valley it gets pretty damn hot.
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Even just past the coastal hills it gets ugly (and cheap) quickly. Inland Empire, San Bernardino, Palm Springs... they're all too hot in the summer to live there without technical means (aka air conditioning.)
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What? That's only 30 years. I don't know about you, but I plan on being alive in 30 years. In fact, I'm hoping to reach 80 or 90.
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Part of the rise in cancer rates is related to the fact that we are less likely to die of other things. We live longer. After a certain point your DNA just fails, since there really isn't an evolutionary reason to debug past a certain time (no longer breeding = no selection pressures). The same goes for coronary problems.
Just because these are more prevalent doesn't mean that there is a novel environmental agent causing the increase.
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Yes, bozo AC is barking at the wrong statistic. Average age is increasing. From a population standpoint that's all that matters (other than quality of life - but that is more an individual metric). You're going to die of something. If you decrease the prevalence of some causes of death, others are going to increase.
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But most of the rise in cancer rates is caused by people eating crap.
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Citation?
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"The percentage of cases attributed to obesity varied widely for different cancer types but was as high as 40 percent for some cancers, particularly endometrial cancer and esophageal adenocarcinoma."
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/obesity [cancer.gov]
"Dietary factors have been thought to account for about 30% of cancers in Western countries1, making diet second
only to tobacco as a preventable cause of cancer."
http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/public_health_nut6.pdf [who.int]
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One study, using NCI Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data, estimated that in 2007 in the United States, about 34,000 new cases of cancer in men (4 percent) and 50,500 in women (7 percent) were due to obesity.
4-7% is hardly "most".
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Confusing the increase with the overall percentage? 4-7% of the baseline is a lot if you look at the delta.
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Assuming they didn't contract cancer, what would they have died of otherwise?
Or is the point to take from this that if they didn't die from cancer, they'd be immortal?
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Look at the star trek memory wall.
Most of the actors (and we are talking the 1960's) who died in their 50's died of cancer and most of the actors who died in their 60's died of heart disease of some kind.
Last I read, half of american men are dead by 75 and half of women by 79.
Most of the risk from eating crap is in order of less than 1% chance change in your death rate.
And recently we are discovering eating TOO little crap causes you to have more strokes.
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Indeed. A much more informative study would be to chart cancer detection rates versus both year and age group. I imagine such a three-dimensional graph might reveal some trends worthy of investigation.
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Don't get me wrong, I do think there are more external influences out there today than previously. And I do think they do play some part in elevated rates of cancer (just like our horrible diet plays a roll in increased rates of coronary issues). But I think that we make a mistake when we attribute these elevated rates to solely external influences.
We're too quick, as a whole, to scream "chemicals!" whenever we see statistics like this, and ignore the fact that our ancestors didn't really live long enough
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Well, it should have been modded funny.
But more seriously, why don't architects in these areas start building for the environment? Two years ago we moved from Santa Monica to Encino. Santa Monica is routinely at least 15 degrees cooler due to its proximity to the ocean. However, the house we bought has a very large attic space with a thermostat controlled fan that pulls in outside air. The attic provides such an excellent buffer that last summer we ran the air conditioner for maybe a total of seven days
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It is because sensible building methods tend to have overall cheaper costs over the lifetime of the structure and the houses don't rot away in fifty years. This means less of our income going to bankers since there will actually be something there for the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren to inherit and the bankers don't like that.
My current favorite is hyperadobe, which is earthbag construction using raschel mesh bags or tubing.
Re:Ocean currents (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a slight shift in ocean currents would make that entire region a barren desert anyway
Um, it pretty much is. Southern California passed its carrying capacity a century ago. The only region it's inhabitable is that massive amounts of water are diverted from the Colorado River Basin to Southern California. It's gotten to the point where upstream governments have outlawed collecting, in rainbarrels, water that falls on your roof to water your garden, because it's "not your water". But it is Southern California's water, you see.
At some point in the future the water source will fail, and the place will become mostly inhabitable. Massive amounts of contingent wealth will be wiped out when this happens. The only thing that could really keep it going is nuclear-powered desalinization, but Californians tend to be anti-nuke (of all types, not just LWR's), so that's unlikely to help them. Even if they could be convinced, the time delay to implement is too long, because they won't act soon enough.
Oh, but they have movie stars.
Re:Ocean currents (Score:4, Interesting)
It's gotten to the point where upstream governments have outlawed collecting, in rainbarrels, water that falls on your roof to water your garden, because it's "not your water". But it is Southern California's water, you see.
That's called "non-riparian water rights," and it goes back to before the western states were even founded. The basis for this system is Common Law legal precedent, not legislation (although most states have passed laws formally codifying their water rights systems... as of over a hundred years ago).
But don't let facts get in your way.
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It's stupid that somebody can't collect rainwater from their roof to water their garden.
But don't let facts get in your way.
Don't let common sense get in yours.
It's his history that's wrong, not his opinion. (Score:3)
It's gotten to the point where upstream governments have outlawed collecting, in rainbarrels, water that falls on your roof
It didn't "get to the point." Rather, there never even was a point where things worked differently.
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You could always do solar powered desalinization. But you're basic point is correct. Too many Californians.
Would you all please do something about it. Perhaps move to Oregon? Trenton, New Jersey?
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The PNW already has enough Califonicators, thank you very much.
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Yeah, everyone will abandon their homes and move away rather than spending a little time, effort, and money to engineer another water source.
I don't know what "point in the future" you are thinking about, but here in San Diego people still have lawns and landscaping that gets watered every day. As long as there's enough water for frivolous aesthetics, your "future" is still unimaginably distant. The biggest near-future expense for local water customers comes from bloated salaries and pensions for water di
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Yeah, everyone will abandon their homes and move away rather than spending a little time, effort, and money to engineer another water source.
Where's this water going to come from? If you mean from the ocean, yes, as I mentioned, but it takes a long time to engineer it. Longer than the period of time it takes for a drought to strike.
I don't know what "point in the future" you are thinking about
Nobody does.
but here in San Diego people still have lawns and landscaping that gets watered every day.
Which is in
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Where's this water going to come from? If you mean from the ocean, yes, as I mentioned, but it takes a long time to engineer it. Longer than the period of time it takes for a drought to strike.
The ocean or a pipeline.
as I mentioned, but it takes a long time to engineer it. Longer than the period of time it takes for a drought to strike.
It would have to be a 5 or 10-year-long drought. Conservation would stretch supplies a long time.
but here in San Diego people still have lawns and landscaping that gets watered every day.
Which is insane.
No it isn't. There's enough water to do it. People are willing to pay the extra $200-500 per year for the water. (Not me though.) If there was less water and it cost $2000-$5000, we'd have very few green lawns and landscaping.
Now consider that to achieve this, people in Colorado are being told they can't collect rainwater for their gardens. Prosecuted for doing so, even.
They shouldn't be. Such things are more about governments asserting their power than anything relating to water. Colorado citizens should fix their stupid law
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LA and the surrounding basin (all the way east to Riverside/San Bernardino) isn't a desert; there's plenty of humidity in the daily onshore breezes and the 15 inches of annual rainfall to keep it out of that category.
But, there isn't nearly enough rainfall/runoff to support 13 million people there.
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Title says "More Hot Weather For Southern California, Says UCLA Study". More hot weather events would be an expected result of global warming.
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Weather = whether it's raining, snowing, none of these, the temperature, etc. outside your house right now.
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1) Attack his age. "Oh, he's an old doddering fool! He's lost his mind!"
2) Call him irrelevant because he's not publishing. "How can he know anything about climate science? He hasn't published a paper for so long!"
3) Attack the media source. "This paper is in the pocket of big oil!"
4) Attack using a straw man. "Oh, but the ice is thinning in Greenland! This proves everything I say and proves you wrong!"
What you won't hear, and w
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Lovelock was always out on the far extremes and the serious, thoughtful scientists were never in his camp. Not Hansen, not Schneider, not Santer, not Alley nor even Jones and Mann.
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Here's an easy one, and try to answer this question without making up a new question in its place: If we can't predict
Re:2041-2060 (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, that's an easy answer: yes, predicting the weather is still hard, although modern predictions are actually very good most of the time, and certainly not as bad as common `wisdom' thinks they are.
However, climate models are about climate, not weather. They predict average weather, and that is easier than predicting the weather on a particular day. In a very similar way you cannot reliably predict the next roll of a dice, but you can very reliably predict the tallies of the next hundred rolls.
When predicting the next rolls of the dice you can even predict the expected error in the prediction: the standard deviation. The climate model of this article is apparently so good that they can also predict the expected deviation, which allows them to predict that there will be these hot spells, even though they are not able to predict the exact days these hot spells will happen.
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This one's really easy.Simple answer: Wrong predicate.
We don't have confidence in long term weather predictions but we do have confidence in long term climate predictions. This is because the former is chaotic while the latter isn't. Remember that the first quantitative predictions by Hansen in 1982 we quite on the money (if a little on the conservative side.)
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Did you read Hansen's 1982? If not I suggest you do, and the comparisons with reality this year on its 30-year anniversary.
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Then you probably noticed that when compared to reality, he was generally on the conservative side.
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My point was not to answer your question but to point out that this man should never have been taken seriously.
Now, for your question about climate models, do you mean predict "past WEATHER" or "past CLIMATE". Please clarify.
In any case, it's a difficult subject and I'm not an expert. I'll start you off with one link and you can befriend Google for the rest - but I suspect you already know where to look.
http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2007/07/18/models_how_good/ [edf.org]
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The problem is that Lovelock has absolutely no precise critiques that would allow you to do much deconstructing. His one specific critique, that it hasn't warmed in the last decade, makes the classic mistake of cherry-picking the starting point of his timeline to coincide with the absolute record high. As a result, his argument holds little water from a purely scientific perspective.
The other two points that the paper makes, and which put the interview squarely in the propaganda/flamebait category, is that
Lovelock is not worth listening to because... (Score:5, Informative)
What you won't hear, and what makes this more religion than science as Lovelock says, is an argument against Lovelock's actual critiques of the state of climate science. It's because his points are too logical and irrefutable, so rather than try and engage in that uphill battle they will change the question posed and make up their own questions to answer.
Okay I'm confused I read the article you linked to and saw this: "Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect." Now I know you are focusing on the second part of the sentence, but did you read the first half of the sentence? For the rest of the article he makes arguments about what sorts of things we should be doing to minimize anthropomorphic global warming.
Now the rhetorical trick you and he are using here is sneaky. He says that the doomsday predictions including his and Al Gore's were incorrect. But his predictions and "Al Gore's Predictions" were never the same, and his predictions were always radically more alarmist than anything real climate scientists predicted. Al Gore, who is not a scientist, but has made an effort to bring scientific results to the public, never made the sort of wild predictions that Lovelock is known for. He implied that he and Al Gore made the same predicitions, and you implied that he and real scientists made the same wild predictions. Mainstream climate science never made the sort of sensational predictions that Lovelock made. In 2006 Lovelock predicted that 80% of the world population would be wiped out by 2100. In 2008 he predicted that by 2040 the Sahara will have grown to encompass Paris and even Berlin! he also predicted in 2008 that by 2040 there would be no vitually food grown in Europe. So when he goes to the media and states that his past alarmism was wrong, anybody who has been paying attention says "no shit!" Real climate scientists have never made those sorts of wild claims. If you haven't been paying attention you might say "oh look an important climate scientist is backpedaling!!" Lovelock was an attention hound then and he is one now. So, i responded to the article you liked to without attacking his age, mentioning that he doesn't publish (or really participate in science at all), without accusing the Guardian or Sun of being biased, or without using a straw man. In fact I demonstrated how he, and you, were using a something similar to a strawman argument by conflating his past hyperbole with real scientific predictions then attacking both as if they were the same. In a followup message you suggested that people "address his valid critiques." The critiques he made in the article you linked to were all about means of addressing the problem of climate change. He suggests that wind energy will never be enough. Fine, i agree. He suggests massive adoption of nuclear energy. Fine, that would be much better than burying our heads in the sand, though there are real problems with nuclear power. He suggests that the political environmental movement is prone to hyperbole. Fine, I'm glad he finally looked in the mirror. He suggests more use of methane gotten through fracking. Fine. Methane is certainly a less carbon intensive fossil fuel than coal, and though fracking is likely to be very damaging to our water supply at least getting methane doesn't involve blowing up whole mountains. So all the things he said have to do with means and methods of dealing with climate change. I think as a society we need to be open to suggestions about means and methods. I'd much rather have that discussion than this endless disinformation campaign trying to hide the fact that climate change is real.
Aliens cause Global Warming (Score:2)
http://www.s8int.com/crichton.html [s8int.com]
Re:Error bar or Confidence interval? (Score:4, Informative)
That's because you don't go read the original papers which always contain information about the uncertainty. Instead you read journalist's accounts of the papers which usually leave the uncertainty out to avoid confusing readers. Mostly the journalist probably doesn't understand it well enough themselves to convey it accurately to their readers anyway.
The published study can be found here [c-change.la] and it does contain uncertainty information. Here is a downloadable PDF of the summary of findings. [c-change.la]
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From the summary. [c-change.la]
Uncertainty in future warming is represented by range projections. For example, the uncertainty range for the warming averaged over the region’s land areas is from 1.7 to 7.5F. This is a 95% uncertainty range, so that there is a 19 out of 20 chance that the correct value lies in this range. The uncertainty is due to variation in the global models and the complex seasonal and topographical features of the L.A. regional climate. Even the lower bound is positive though, indicating extremely high confidence in the likelihood of warming by mid-century.
Sounds reasonable to me.
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If all that climate scientists did was to run computer simulations, you might have a point. However, there is much more than that. You can take your simulation, run it backwards, see if it predicts previous climates. You (or others) can go dig up fossils, rocks and other assorted data bits and come up with climate models from earlier in the earth's life time.
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful." (George Box)
Modeling is part of climate science, but not all of it by any means.
Your argument can
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Climate models are one way of testing climate related hypotheses by synthesizing what we currently think we know about climate into a coherent whole. In general they do better at projecting the future than simpler methods. [realclimate.org] There may be "trillions" of variables affecting climate but once you get past the 5 or 10 biggest factors the rest are just vernier adjustments. As for the rest of your post, heat (and visible light) reflected from clouds is measurable but it's difficult to do on a global scale, we kno
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Computer models are nowadays also used to design aircraft, and they are so good that new aircraft routinely perform nearly perfectly on first flight. Modern highly complex ICs in bleeding-edge processes are supposed to work at first tape-out, all design and verification is done by computer. As long as you know the limitations of your model, computer modeling is a very valuable tool.
And look here, the authors of this article do know the limitations of their model:
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Come on, predicting aircraft behavior is far more than just 'CAD design of a piece of machinery'. It involves predictions of aerodynamic behavior, which also requires far-from-trivial computer models, and it involves predicting 'flyability', which requires careful modeling of human-machine interactions.
Nobody is claiming that whole-world climate models are already as robust or as accurate as these aircraft models, but they are getting more and more sophisticated, and they are certainly far beyond the stage
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It's really sad that these climate theorists consider computer models the equivalent of science.
What's sad is that you think that "climate theorists consider computer models the equivalent of science" is in any way an accurate description of how climatology works. But your post illustrates perfectly why it's impossible to have a rational debate on climate change: one side is talking about science, while the other side is talking about their idea of what the first side is talking about, and that idea has no connection with reality.
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So the newsies get to run a couple "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FRY" news stories a year.
A LOT more than two, actually. They can also run them when the temperature is a tie or near tie for the record. That happens a lot because the newscasts work on whole-number degrees, which is a very coarse measurement.
They have a LOT of measurement stations in any geographic area (typically at least one for each suburb in an urban zone), most of them with shorter histories and all of them with statistical noise on the measurem
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Assume the climate is completely unchanging (rather than systematically drifting) and the measurements are randomly distributed (a multi-modal distribution around the various weather patterns typical for the date).
They're either randomly distributed or have a modal distribution. They can't be both: the terms are mutually exclusive.
Then this year's new sample is exactly as likely to be the new record (in a given direction) as any of the others. 1 in 181.
No, because they're clearly *not* randomly distributed. The idea that the temperature on the 5th of August, in any particular location, is equally likely to be -10 degrees, 30 degrees or 70 degrees, is clearly and obviously ridiculous.
See, now I'm left in a quandary....you used the term "multi-modal" distribution in your post: now, either you don't actually know what that means and wer
Re:LOLs (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is easier to predict: Tomorrow's exact temperature or generally how warm the weather will be in August?
Re: (Score:2)
It's easier to predict that an AC is going to come up with a stupid, ignorant statement.
100% certainty, in fact.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? The weathermen around here do an excellent job of forecasting several days in advance.
Re:Complete Hogwash (Score:5, Insightful)
If the weather cannot be accurately predicted 100% of the time for three days in advance, why would anyone believe they can predict it based on some trending for the next 50 years?
Because they understand how science works.