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

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

#171

Post by turbinerneiter »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #105
turbinerneiter wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your model suddenly changes its predictions, you need to make 100% sure you know why and that is valid. Just imagine they would go public with this "Scientists found climate change is worse than previously thought with updated model" and then weeks later find an error in the changes made to the model "Scientists made mistakes, climate change less severe than previously thought". What do you think would hurt their…

Well this is the problem. People are reticient to make public a private finding that is different, because it is probably wrong and they'll probably lose credibility. But if everyone is doing that...

They are not reticent to make it public, they are publishing papers and are asking for peer review. There is a public newspaper article about it with quotes of the involved scientists. They couldn't be any more transparent about this.

They are not throwing away their findings and they are not burying it. They are working to valdiate/invaldiate them, because they are scientists.

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

#172

Post by usaar333 »

Frost1x wrote: post #53
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.

We humans have developed one fairly good approach to problem solving by focusing on localized concerns and self-interest. For many problems, this seems to work fairly well with a few negative yet manageable side-effects. In my opinion, these approaches completely fail at solving large issues that require large orchestrated efforts that require things at state, nation, and even world scale and longer timescales than a…

We've solved plenty of problems at scale; think ozone layer depletion being reduced.

The problem with climate change is that it is really expensive to fix with highly uncertain costs to do so.

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

#173

Post by Kaiyou »

lucisferre wrote: post #87
protanopia wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it would be terribly foolhardy for us to stop polluting the atmosphere prematurely.

We might be steering into an ice age and Co2 induced global warming is the only way for humanity to survive.

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

#174

Post by born_a_skeptic »

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…

And who builds those models, people probably have a hidden agenda, because everyone has one.

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

#175

Post by gmueckl »

viklove wrote: post #164
rayiner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Total War economy/society > quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing. The impact on quality of life and society would be "astonishing," but they won't be improvements. The Soviets and Chinese tried similar "mobilization[s]" for food production. The idea was to direct society's efforts to producing enough food for everybody. Tens of millions…

> It turns out that governments are bad at running economies. Extrapolating a general theory from just two examples seems like a mistake.

Well, what other experimental data is there? If these incidents are the only data points, then that's the natural extrapolation, even though it is only weakly supported.

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

#176

Post by bannable »

New_Horizon wrote: post #130
cm2187 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the main problem I have with climate science. They don't really have the luxury of proving by experimentation, and I have seen enough perfectly good backtestings in my industry (finance) that go wildely off as soon as they go live, that I have a fundamental mistrust of backtesting as a way to calibrate a predictive model.

Especially because they seem to test it by making it predict history, but we don't have anywhere near the same amount of historical data. So what are you testing, really? Just that it accurately finds average temps?

Climate models as far back as the 1970s have predicted the temperature changes in the time from then to now -- those are not predictions that are coming from hindsight, but rather predictions where their effects were observed over the last 50 years.

If you are unfamiliar with climate sensitivity, this is a good place to start: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htm

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

#177

Post by monkeynotes »

Angostura wrote: post #92
leifdenby wrote: post #47

There is a big observational campaign happening right now that is trying to get to the heart of this called EUREC4A (main website: http://eurec4a.eu and information sheet: http://eurec4a.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eurec4a/2019/Press/E... ). The key uncertainty between different climate models is whether shallow clouds in the tropics (which in general cool the Earth through radiation) will disappear or not and make our…

I suppose my immediate question is - is there any way for an non-professional with a pair of eyes and a smartphone to contribute in a crowd-sourcy way?

Seems like a recipe for bad data and undiscoverable flaws.

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

#179

Post by LMYahooTFY »

cagenut wrote: post #150
samatman wrote: post #129

I'm reminded of Feynman's famous anecdote about the Millikan oil drop experiment: Millikan underestimated the charge of the electron, and over the ensuing years, subsequent measurements slowly but surely converged on the correct value. Why? Because experimenters who got the correct value figured it must be too high, and ran the experiment again until they got a more-erroneous value, one that was nonetheless higher. E…

this is textbook middlebrow contrarianism. using some quote from some recognizable name to dismiss the incredible work of dozens of top of their field professionals doing their life's work. its a perfect example of the way hacker news "types" do climate change denial. via endless "well-actuallys" until you're lost and stuck in a level of analysis-paralysis that borders on an anxiety disorder. the problem with solving…

This reads as remarkably dismissive of a well thought out comment about the difficulty of dialing in metrics and manifesting social pressures. Your comment in no way addressed these topics, and instead moved the line, beyond which lie "outright-deniers" (i.e. deluded people), further up to include anyone who expresses skepticism, or apparently who doesn't accept the coordinated work of thousands of scientists whole-sale and without question.

The result being, you equate someone expressing questions about the any parts of this process with deluded people. This doesn't seem conducive to healthy discussion.

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

#180

Post by jellicle »

samatman wrote: post #129

I'm reminded of Feynman's famous anecdote about the Millikan oil drop experiment: Millikan underestimated the charge of the electron, and over the ensuing years, subsequent measurements slowly but surely converged on the correct value. Why? Because experimenters who got the correct value figured it must be too high, and ran the experiment again until they got a more-erroneous value, one that was nonetheless higher. E…

So close, but not quite.

The oil drop results (Millikan was less than 1% off, by the way) show the pressure on scientists to conform with the current status quo, the pressure NOT to release shocking or unexpected results. In climate science, that means underplaying the results, biasing them towards less catastrophic findings, and there's a great deal of evidence that that is what has been happening. For instance, the gold standard climate documents, the IPCC reports, represent a consensus and therefore if 99% of scientists believe 100 units of climate change is coming, and 1% of scientists believe no more than 30 units of climate change is coming, 30 units is what is reported (the amount everyone can agree on). This is a huge underreporting bias, only slowly corrected with each new report.

Good on you for your scientific approach, you just basically reversed the signs in your equation.

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