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

181–190 of 332 posts

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

#181

Post by derefr »

monkeynotes wrote: post #177
Angostura wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really; you'd probably take the Folding@Home approach† to work distribution: assign each small piece as a job to N non-trustworthy "workers" (humans, computers), and then trust the results if all N results concur. If they don't, fail the job back into the work queue to be tried again later with different workers. (And maybe give the workers a reputation score, kicking out the ones who participate in enough failed jobs.)

† does this general strategy have a name?

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

#182

Post by bannable »

lazyjones wrote: post #163
bannable wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you claiming that it is not possible to find a trend in a mean temperature of a great many points across the globe, over a long period of time? What makes such a measurement an "invalid form"?

It is not possible if there aren't valid temperature measurements available for all points throughout the measured period of time, so that many temperatures are "interpolated", estimated etc.

Except that we do have a massive number of recorded temperatures across a massive number of locations in the last 100 years. Climate models, some dating back to the 1970s, have correctly predicted global temperature changes in the 50 years since based on this data.

The measurements are real, and there is an established history of the models being generally correct (if not in specific details) by now. Climate study is not the new science you seem to think it is.

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

#183

Post by sp332 »

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?

Yeah - get out the vote.

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

#184

Post by qubex »

It seems to me that the problem has never been a “lack of Science”, but rather a lack of political wherewithal to actually implement the drastic, necessary steps.

There’s probably been a collective tendency to (try) to view what was coming our way through rose-tinted glasses, some unconscious effort to lowball the projections in order to have a less catastrophic outlook. Maybe the computers models are finally beginning to converge on a more realistic scenario as they factor in the actual changes that have occurred so far.

It has never ceased to amaze me how we have oodles of science fiction films that feature a lone astronomer spotting an incoming asteroid and that then segue into the whole of humanity pulling together to build a fleet of spacecraft to flee on or thermonuclear weapons to blast the thing out of the sky with, but in reality we’ve had people warning us of approaching doom for seventy years and haven’t managed much more than a collective “YOLO LOL”.

I have some experience in sensitivity analysis on stochastic systems such as climate models, and it seems to me that feedback loops are probably becoming increasingly tightly correlated, which in my field (macroeconomics) tends to herald massive discontinuities.

I am not at all happy about this. At all.

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

#185

Post by bumby »

qubex wrote: post #167
Angostura wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why do you want to a horde of “non-professional[s] with a pair of eyes and a smartphone” to contribute if literally hundreds of professionals with high-end equipment, meteorological observation satellites, and oodles of computational firepower are already on the task? The main problem has never been a lack of science, the problem has always been (and alas, continues to be) a lack of political wherewithal to actually…

I think what precedes the problem you mention (and one of the main points in the article) is the problem of generating reduced uncertainty in the model. Maybe there’s a chance for more granular data to enhance that?

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

#186

Post by gvurrdon »

derefr wrote: post #181
monkeynotes wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a recipe for bad data and undiscoverable flaws.

Not really; you'd probably take the Folding@Home approach† to work distribution: assign each small piece as a job to N non-trustworthy "workers" (humans, computers), and then trust the results if all N results concur. If they don't, fail the job back into the work queue to be tried again later with different workers. (And maybe give the workers a reputation score, kicking out the ones who participate in enough failed…

There's already a related climate project:

https://www.climateprediction.net/

I used to work for them a few years ago.

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

#187

Post by qubex »

mondoshawan wrote: post #139
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…

Can we get the source for the models?

http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm4.0/ seems to offer what you are looking for (first Google hit for “NCAR climate model source code”) but without a cluster of supercomputing nodes, what are you planning to do with it?

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

#188

Post by shusson »

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…

I don't think the OP was suggesting we do nothing, but rather we should ground our fundamentals in the scientific method. We do not have another planet Earth to test climate change on. That doesn't mean we should do nothing, but we should also understand our limits in predicting a system like our planet Earth.

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

#189

Post by gus_massa »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #103
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…

>I’m a climate change skeptic almost entirely because I don’t trust models. You don't have to believe the models: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/climateletter.pdf

That is essentially the same argument than in the Pascal's wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

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

#190

Post by jellicle »

usaar333 wrote: post #172
Frost1x wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Climate action has a net negative cost; spending $10 will get you more than $10 of benefit for almost any intervention you'd care to name.

So it's not expensive in any long-run calculation, only the short-run.

Post reply on HN