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

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271–280 of 332 posts

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

#271
post #153

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…

Thanks for the straw man. American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people - that's not an intrinsic attribute of a country focusing on something. Think also new deal / public works projects like the Hoover Dam (many died working on the Dam but not because it was a government mobilization project). Just the government spending a bunch of money on environmentally focused projects could happen and could be good…

American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people

Um, sure it did? Killing a lot of people was, in a sense, the goal.

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

#272

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…

Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) speaks prolifically [1] about how the (perverse) incentives in climate science are actually in the opposite direction from your expectation, towards less alarmism. Policymakers want to hear that the problem is fixable with little disruption to the status quo. These policymakers and their representatives are more likely to dismiss climate predictions that require radical action. This leads many climate modelers to include tricks such as negative emission technologies (NETs) -- which are pure science fiction -- in order to keep emission reduction prescriptions friendly to their audience. Thus, the models become more moderate while the situation grows more dire.

One recent example of such a dynamic was Germany's recent plan to phase out coal (by 2038). The committee that drew up the recommendations was overruled on several key elements, such as the decision to not to open a new coal power plant this year. Although the committee was and is correct that opening new coal power plants is not compatible with our CO2 emissions goals under the Paris agreement, which are in turn our best estimate of the maximum we can emit and still have civilization past the next couple decades, lawmakers didn't want to hear it.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk49vAmNoiQ

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

#273
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that you asking honestly, and not just trying to derail the conversation... Start here: https://skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enha... Then proceed to intermediate and advanced. There are a TON of citations for your perusal. After your are done with that, the comments have some additional insights. Have fun. This is quite the rabbit hole to dive into.

Skeptical Science is not an academic publication. It's a blog. What was the CO2 ppm in the early Holocene? Why was the early Holocene so much warmer than today in spite of lower CO2 concentrations? Early Holocene Temperature Oscillations Exceed Amplitude of Observed and Projected Warming in Svalbard Lakes https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

> There are a TON of citations

Here's one of them from that page, chosen at random: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.5589/m04-044

A blog page linking a bunch of academic papers is as good as a hackernews comment linking a bunch of academic papers.

Your linked paper is about arctic temperatures, not global average temperatures.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OP is arguing that the models are likely to overestimate warming/damage. The logical conclusion from there is that the damage isnt as bad as predicted and therefore less action needs to be taken.

And this is truly textbook HN behavior when it comes to climate change. You see it over and over.

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

#275

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…

The reason clouds are starting to be simulated now where they weren't before is probably because we have only recently had the computing power available to do this at the level of detail required. Switching the 'clouds' feature on and off is part of the model verification process. Listen to this podcast[0], it's a in depth technical discussion about weather forecasting models with the actual scientists that create them. They discuss model verification for weather models and they touch on how this also applies to climate modelling.

[0]http://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-ec...

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

#276
post #183

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?

Yeah - get out the vote.

If I could downvote you I would, but this comment will have to suffice.

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

#277
post #118

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…

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.

From the article: "A recent study compared models as old as 1970 with observations made in the decades since. Some models warmed up too much, and some too little, but 14 of 17 past projections turned out to be consistent with the measured path of global average temperatures."

So we actually did an experimental test of the predictions made in 1970, and those predictions turned out to be largely correct.

We should probably halt this experiment on ethical grounds.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you would have lost the bet in 2016 and 2017. Did climate get colder?

no, a noisy measure around a globally increasing trend line went down. I believe that the noisy measure goes up, on average, because it is (noisily) measuring a warming climate. I'll make that bet every year, and I will come out ahead... using the trend line, you could set odds at which the betting on a colder 2021 would be the correct bet - but it isn't 50/50, which it would be if the process were random noise. as a…

> * I'll make that bet every year, and I will come out ahead...*

Good luck with that, but you first asked about one year (next year), which is a different matter altogether.

> (edit: do you actually not understand the basics of statistical inference? this is like, middle-level high school math.

I completely understand your point and how you are trying to move the goalpost from an easily refutable argument to something more useful. Perhaps your "professional poker player" mind doesn't understand that recent increases/decreases in temperature averages affect next year's weather, whereas past poker games don't affect your current one.

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

#279

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 question a lot the models as well. I think pollution is a big problem in general, but CO2 is totally the wrong focus; like focusing on the sniffles and ignoring the flu. The real issue is consumerism and consumption. We cannot buy our way out of environmental disaster, but the CO2 camp is trying to offer that option: buy green, electric cars, etc. In realize, we need fewer cars, more trains, better transport option…

No, there's no debate in science this reality. You are just anti-science.

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

#280

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 question a lot the models as well. I think pollution is a big problem in general, but CO2 is totally the wrong focus; like focusing on the sniffles and ignoring the flu. The real issue is consumerism and consumption. We cannot buy our way out of environmental disaster, but the CO2 camp is trying to offer that option: buy green, electric cars, etc. In realize, we need fewer cars, more trains, better transport option…

Wont you be kind enough to tell us which of the thousands of peer reviewed papers on the IPCCH website (ipcch.ch) website your data disputes.

Taliban

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