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Do climate models predict extreme weather?

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Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#161

Post by andrewflnr »

mikeyouse wrote: post #115
Breazy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are better at sniffing out lies than they are at sniffing out whatever good intentions might have motivated those lies.

I really don’t think that’s true. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of additional Americans are dead from Covid because they believed easily disprovable lies about the safety and efficacy of vaccines by people who have reputations for lying. Most people believe anyone they consider to be an authority. It’s too exhausting otherwise.

More accurately, people are really good at sniffing out lies when it benefits their worldview somehow (and terrible when it doesn't). Why people think conspiracy theories benefit their worldview is a different and stickier question, but somehow they do, so they're hypersensitive to any lies deployed against the lies they prefer.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#162

Post by yodsanklai »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #149
enkid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a specific example of what you are talking about? What noble lies were being told about COVID? I heard a lot of "we don't knows, but here is the best bet" which were not lies, but all of the lies I heard absolutely were not noble in that they were not for the public's best interest, but rather for the best interest of the individual saying them.

In Canada they said masks don't work and even make things worse, despite every Asian country using them at the time.

Same in France. Then a couple of months later, masks were mandatory outdoors even in low-density areas. I feel that treating people like children overall hurts public trust.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#163

Post by jounker »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #7

I believe in climate change, but if you look into how the climate change computer models are written, it really makes me feel like it is contrived. Here's the problem with climate change modeling, you are modeling a complex chaotic system, you just cannot do it accurately. You have to be honest about it.

Climate researchers don’t just make up models and then assume they are right. They actually compare them against the reach world.

For example, we have fairly detailed climate related data sets going back many thousands of years, coming from many different kinds of sources. You input these as starting conditions to a model, run the model forward, and then see how accurate its predictions are against later historical data.

Despite your feelings about is or is not possible, there is very strong research that shows that climate modeling works.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#164

Post by refurb »

sanxiyn wrote: post #93
magicalhippo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way is to verify them. Run multiple variations on data from the 1950's and see how they compare to measured values up to today. Throw away the models that don't fit the measured values. Then you have some confidence that the remaining variations may be representative when run into the future. This is also done in weather forecasting, though maybe they run the model in reverse, I can't recall. Same idea though, ve…

Yes this happens, but it is very controversial. To quote from the article I linked above: > The question of whether the twentieth-century warming should be considered a target of model development or an emergent property is polarizing the climate modeling community, with 35% of modelers stating that twentieth-century warming was rated very important to decisive, whereas 30% would not consider it at all during develop…

Not going to lie but it sounds like there is significant disagreement among scientists on evaluating climate models?

And do I read it right that 35% of scientists deem it important that a model indicates future warming? Science doesn’t work that way, you don’t get to choose a conclusion then model for it.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#165

Post by vixen99 »

carschno wrote: post #156
mythrwy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we know the truth. 100% won't achieve herd immunity.

This is another good example of the issue of misinterpretating true statistics by large portions of the population as outlined above about climate change. Many now understand that even 100% vaccination alone might not end the pandemic, so the conclusion is often "vaccination doesn't work" -- which is much further away from the truth, but fits better into binary thinking and "intuition". Of course, the problem with pe…

Belief is comforting. Many prefer to focus on established findings and accepted facts as they emerge. We know that the vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission. Its advantage lies in its effect in reducing but not always preventing severe symptoms and death in vulnerable people. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-....

Both believers and non-believers tend to be immune - to any findings that run counter to their belief systems. Instead of objectively weighing up pros and cons they get rather heated and adopt binary thinking along pro- and anti-vaccination lines with some indulging in the same trap themselves.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#166

Post by janto »

labster wrote: post #135
throwawaylinux wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the world is not HN, where nuanced discussions work. Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way. So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm. Because if we wait for everyone to feel the impact in earnest, it will be far too late. This is f…

I’m just a software dev now. It’s mostly just people I meet, though I’ve done some lobbying too. Lobbying is a fascinating thing, because all the staff really wants to know is if this issue could help/hurt them in a campaign. I remember once when Zoe Lofgren told me that while she agreed with my issue, there was zero chance Congress would take it up without handling a bunch of barely related issues. The lie mainly ha…

You want to control how people act and feel above all else.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#167

Post by roenxi »

carschno wrote: post #156
mythrwy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we know the truth. 100% won't achieve herd immunity.

This is another good example of the issue of misinterpretating true statistics by large portions of the population as outlined above about climate change. Many now understand that even 100% vaccination alone might not end the pandemic, so the conclusion is often "vaccination doesn't work" -- which is much further away from the truth, but fits better into binary thinking and "intuition". Of course, the problem with pe…

I think the more likely issue is that they are assuming that the vaccine's efficacy is aligned with the strength of the efforts being put into mandating it. When they discover those efforts are excessive they get upset.

A reasonable scenario that doesn't get bought up enough is that average people have a radically different risk tolerance than professionals working in the healthcare industry. 1 in 10,000 incidents mean very little to a person on the street but translate into actual work for a healthcare worker.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#168

Post by [deleted] »

_y5hn wrote: post #137
labster wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. After a year of high school physics and a year of mechanics and electrodynamics, they finally get around to telling you: that was kind of all lies, here’s relativity. And then a month later they do it again for quantum, and finally admit they don’t know what is really going on. But Newtonian mechanics is useful!

They should state the truth in first year: We have absolutely no final answers for you, and these years will soon be forgotten. You'll earn more earlier taking any job now. Education is overrated in business anyway.

[deleted]

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#169

Post by sanxiyn »

refurb wrote: post #164
sanxiyn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this happens, but it is very controversial. To quote from the article I linked above: > The question of whether the twentieth-century warming should be considered a target of model development or an emergent property is polarizing the climate modeling community, with 35% of modelers stating that twentieth-century warming was rated very important to decisive, whereas 30% would not consider it at all during develop…

Not going to lie but it sounds like there is significant disagreement among scientists on evaluating climate models? And do I read it right that 35% of scientists deem it important that a model indicates future warming? Science doesn’t work that way, you don’t get to choose a conclusion then model for it.

Yes, there is (and continues to be) significant disagreement among scientists on evaluating climate models. This is normal and has always been the case from the very beginning of climate models.

No, you read it wrong. 35% thinks it appropriate to fit to past warming. Of course nobody is suggesting to fit to future warming! But past warming is observed.

If you are familiar with training/test split in machine learning, some thinks past warming is in training set (and test with things like reproducing ENSO), and some thinks past warming is in test set. I think it boils down to disagreement over how determined was twentieth-century warming.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#170

Post by avianlyric »

godelski wrote: post #99
avianlyric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chaos is also different at different scales. At certain point chaos can be simulated as noise with a known distribution. You can’t make predictions within the noise, but you can describe the shape of the noise and it’s impact on macro scale systems. Perfect example of this is quantum effects. Zoom in far enough and quantum effects make the world entirely unpredictable, and yet I can still accurately predict where I t…

But different noises do different things and have different predictive powers. I think your statements about these systems being impossible to calculate are too strong. We use gaussian noise all the time. In fact there's plenty of machine learning models that use noise and change of variables (we learn the transforms) to represent different distributions. Ones that do actually have good clustering. We can be predicti…

I think we in perfect agreement here. Like I said in my comment, we can accurately describe the shape of noise, and that’s incredibly useful for making predictions. But we can’t make absolute deterministic predictions within the noise.

I.e. we can say thing X has a 90% probability of happening. But we can’t say thing X will happen.

And of course a strong probabilistic prediction is incredibly powerful and useful. I don’t want to suggest that it isn't, but it’s not an absolute prediction. And once again usefulness of a probabilistic prediction is almost always as useful as an absolute prediction (I would also argue that absolute prediction don’t really exist in the real world, they’re just extremely high confidence probabilistic predictions, but you haven’t bothered to model the actual noise).

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