Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 332 posts

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#61

Post by mattrp »

docdeek wrote: post #9
trevyn wrote: post #5

At the end of the article, apparently it has something to do with clouds.

I’ve read a few times that clouds are a big problem for climate modelers as they are far more complex in their implications for the climate than my grade school planet heats > evaporation > cloud forms > rain falls understanding of them suggests. There’s a nice article here on the issue and frustration of clouds for climate modelers by the head of the Royal Meteorological Society here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/gue…

Yes water vapor specifically has been a big asterisk for a long time.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#62

Post by jacquesm »

giarc wrote: post #29

If you are like me, you hate reading articles like this. You know there is a problem but you feel like you can't do anything about it. You recycle, you turn off lights, you have a programmable thermostat but you know it's a drop in the ocean. I finally decided to do something about it last fall. I researched and have committed to purchasing green power. Every month I purchase 850 kWh for $22 from Bullfrog Power (a Ca…

I am like you. And you and me both will be on the wrong side of history anyway, simply because we have children. It's the singles that are doing more for climate change than all those people with kids combined.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#63

Post by chrisco255 »

DennisP wrote: post #42
lbsnake7 wrote: post #30

I’m a climate change skeptic almost entirely because I don’t trust models. I believe there are too many dynamic things happening in the world for anyone to be able to predict accurately say the next 100 years (solar, earthquakes, volcanoes etc). One way to make me a believer though is an experiment: if I were to give you a 100 year stretch of history and you were able to accurately predict with the models what exactl…

People use models to try to nail down the details, not to see whether climate change from CO2 emissions is a real thing. That's well established by physics and geological history. A good presentation of this evidence is in a couple chapters of Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren .

Could you point me to the academic, empirical research that quantifies the influence of CO2 on climate? Not a book, but from an academic publication.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#64

Post by JackFr »

madaxe_again wrote: post #24
fabian2k wrote: post #10

The title seems like clickbait, and the last part of the article does explain that the scientists actually know that new cloud models are mostly responsible for the change. The big question is then of course whether the new cloud model is wrong and the temperature increase therefore as well, or whether the new cloud model is more accurate than previous ones and the temperature increase is a real effect. I found anoth…

Cloud modelling is only part of it - advances in computing have allowed the reduction of cell size, allowing more detailed and therefore hopefully more accurate physical simulations.

> advances in computing have allowed the reduction of cell size, allowing more detailed and therefore hopefully more accurate physical simulations.

'Hopefully' is doing a lot of work there. In modeling a highly dimensional dynamic system it's not obvious that a smaller cell size will lead to more accurate predictions.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#65

Post by HenryKissinger »

derg wrote: post #19
adrianN wrote: post #3

Well, politicians aren't doing anything anyway, whether the models predict catastrophe or CATASTROPHE. Already according to the 3° sensitivity predictions we would need an effort that rivals WW2 to stay below 1.5°. Yet major countries are led by climate denialists.

Can you even imagine how a Total War economy/society based on transitioning to greener energies, cutting emissions and pollutants, and working on improvements to housing and urban planning would end up looking? Like ignoring the whole climate change thing for a moment (though we absolutely should not do that), just the quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring wou…

That would not be possible today.

The wartime World War Two economy we learn about in school was only made possible because of two factors:

1) A massive surge in federal government spending, financed by borrowing from public markets (incl. war bonds), to buy the materiel needed to fight a war on two fronts (in Europe against Germany and in the Pacific against Japan). Such spending caused the public debt as a share of GDP to surge to its highest historical level ever, from about 40% at the start of the war to 100% at its peak, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_... . Today, without such a total war effort, we are running trillion dollar deficits. To put it as shortly and bluntly as I could, trying the same thing today would bankrupt the government. Our debt levels are far higher than they were then, in relative terms, and increasing by over a trillion every year. We would be looking at 2 or 3 trillion dollar deficits. Deficits of that magnitude might shake investors' confidence in the U.S.'s ability to service its debt.

2) The United States was coming out of the Great Depression, and the unemployed labor pool was in the double digits, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Un... . In other words, there were a lot of unemployed people with nothing to do who could quickly be put to work to produce stuff for the war economy. This is not the case today. The economy is running at full employment. The large spare labor pool that existed then doesn't exist today.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#66

Post by Accujack »

klodolph wrote: post #22
fabian2k wrote: post #10

The title seems like clickbait, and the last part of the article does explain that the scientists actually know that new cloud models are mostly responsible for the change. The big question is then of course whether the new cloud model is wrong and the temperature increase therefore as well, or whether the new cloud model is more accurate than previous ones and the temperature increase is a real effect. I found anoth…

Or a third, frustrating possibility—the new cloud model is more accurate, but some other inaccuracy in the model used to be balanced out by the inaccurate cloud model.

Or that there are multiple inaccuracies in the model which interact, so finding and correcting each one makes progress but still doesn't improve the model overall.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#67

Post by lostapathy »

pacala wrote: post #43
adrianN wrote: post #3

Well, politicians aren't doing anything anyway, whether the models predict catastrophe or CATASTROPHE. Already according to the 3° sensitivity predictions we would need an effort that rivals WW2 to stay below 1.5°. Yet major countries are led by climate denialists.

Major countries are led by popular demands. Minor countries as well. Vast overuse of energy resources is a pattern intertwined with modern life, from housing to transportation to food to recreation. The people demand having a vehicle with more than 100hp at their whim. Now picture a herd of 100 horses for every person on Earth. It is political suicide to propose cutting down to ecological sustainable levels of 1 hors…

We already know how to reduce population - education for women and access to contraception. Birth rates have slowed so much in some parts of the world that it is, apparently, worrying for their economic stability.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#68

Post by [deleted] »

derg wrote: post #19
adrianN wrote: post #3

Well, politicians aren't doing anything anyway, whether the models predict catastrophe or CATASTROPHE. Already according to the 3° sensitivity predictions we would need an effort that rivals WW2 to stay below 1.5°. Yet major countries are led by climate denialists.

Can you even imagine how a Total War economy/society based on transitioning to greener energies, cutting emissions and pollutants, and working on improvements to housing and urban planning would end up looking? Like ignoring the whole climate change thing for a moment (though we absolutely should not do that), just the quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring wou…

[deleted]

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#69

Post by protanopia »

orev wrote: post #37
justadudeama wrote: post #23

I am not a climate change denier by a long shot, but stories like these give a ding to the credibility of climate scientists. > "So we can't throw them out yet." This might be an elementary view of science, but I think there is a danger here that while everyone is making their models, if anyone is an outlier they go and tweak their model to match the patterns of others: 'Klaus Wyser’s group "switched off" some of the…

Tweaking the inputs would help one to identify what factor is causing the difference, which allows you to focus on that. It doesn’t mean you permanently leave it out. And it does not make a credibility issue. This is how science works — it is a process that strives to be as accurate as possible, not come up with a static answer and stick to it (that’s what religion does). The ability for science to change and adapt i…

It certainly does hurt the credibility of people saying we need drastic changes now based upon the models. If the answer might change next year, then making a drastic change based upon the current projections seems foolhardy.

Re: Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

#70

Post by AnthonyMouse »

adrianN wrote: post #3

Well, politicians aren't doing anything anyway, whether the models predict catastrophe or CATASTROPHE. Already according to the 3° sensitivity predictions we would need an effort that rivals WW2 to stay below 1.5°. Yet major countries are led by climate denialists.

> Already according to the 3° sensitivity predictions we would need an effort that rivals WW2 to stay below 1.5°.

Comparisons to a war are overly dramatic because it puts the destruction on the opposite side of the effort. If you're in a war and two countries spend a trillion dollars fighting the war, those resources go to causing trillions of dollars of damage to the other country -- most of the cost of the war is getting bombed, not making bombs. With climate change it's the opposite -- the more we do against it, the less damage there is overall. On top of that, most of the "costs" are just replacing other costs -- you have to spend money building solar panels, but then you don't have to spend money doing oil exploration or mining coal, which offsets most to all of the cost.

On top of that, wars are characteristically fought by governments with all the bureaucratic inefficiency that implies, whereas the single biggest thing we could do against climate change is to accurately price carbon and then let the market find the most efficient way to optimize it out.

Obviously that doesn't get us out of actually doing it, but the biggest problem isn't that it's actually that hard from an economic perspective, it's that it's hard from a political perspective because the oil industry has a trillion dollar interest in not ceasing to exist.

Post reply on HN