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Do climate models predict extreme weather?

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Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#171

Post by Retric »

_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.

I think we can reasonably treat collage students as adults capable of making informed decisions. Most people failing to finish the physics PHD end up in reasonable places, it’s hardly the trap most people getting a 200,000+$ history degree would be in.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#172

Post by chiefalchemist »

dragonwriter wrote: post #44
chiefalchemist wrote: post #40

I believe the climate it changing. I believe human activity has contributed to these changes. However, I do not believe _every_ "extreme event" belongs in that category. For example, the recent fires in the Denver / Boulder. Have you been there? It's effectively a desert. Dry, very dry. Open. There are few natural barriers once a fire starts. Based on what I know of the area, those homes - God bless those families -…

> For example, the recent fires in the Denver / Boulder. Have you been there? It's effectively a desert. Dry, very dry. Not normally, so much, but yes, when the entire state ranges between “abnormally dry” and “extreme drought” [0], it probably seems desert-like. But...how are those unusual and extreme conditions an argument against the events being a product of anthropogenic climate change? [0] https://droughtmonito…

Against? The point is, the state of that state in that area is naturally a fire hazard. Toss in some wind - which is as old as the earth itself - and POOF! disaster happens.

Humans love to build homes and structures where they probably should not. We have this false ideal that we're bigger, stronger, and faster than Mother Nature. And then when it goes sideways we blame MN. That's not working out well.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#173

Post by avianlyric »

hammock wrote: post #76
dTal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Pick a spot offshore and measure the water depth, to the centimeter. Moment to moment, the precise value varies chaotically due to countless transient phenomena, from the direction and strength of the wind to the heading of the last boat to come anywhere near it. However the tides can be forecast years out. Just because weather is chaotic and unpredictable doesn't mean that climate is.

>Sure. Pick a spot offshore and measure the water depth, to the centimeter. Moment to moment, the precise value varies chaotically due to countless transient phenomena, from the direction and strength of the wind to the heading of the last boat to come anywhere near it. That's a good analogy of my skepticism for AGW. We are saying temps went up 1c over 100 years, taking daily measurements, and comparing them to ice c…

Ice core measurements give you a value for each year. You’re looking for changes in the ice that are driven by yearly seasonal changes, notably the periods of summer where the ice received 24hour of sun for weeks.

It’s perfectly reasonable to take daily measurements, average them into yearly measurements. Then compare them to yearly averages taken from ice cores.

The only reason we can even use ice cores for temperature measurements is because they’re have high enough resolution that we’ve been able to observe the impact of global temperature on the most recent layers of ice. It’s not like someone drilled an ice core one day and discovered a bunch of temperatures sharpied down the side. They drilled many ice cores, then spent months correlating observed patterns to temperature records so they could build a model that allows them to understand the link between temperature and observed patterns in the ice.

Don’t mistake a record measuring thousands of years of history for a record that only records every thousand years.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#174

Post by avianlyric »

sanxiyn wrote: post #127
godelski wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're looking to have an answer and seeking to justify that answer. There's not just one model. There's dozens of competing ones. So we have to draw one of two concussions. If climate is only model able by chance, we got lucky a lot of times. Someone should be buying a lot of lottery tickets because the science community is way luckier than the expected value. That dozens of independent research teams were a…

I am saying while 40-year-old model is likely accurate by skill, it was luck 50-year-old model produced similar results to 40-year-old model. The reason is aerosol. Agreement of multiple models doesn't invalidate this because all 70s models didn't include aerosol.

Just because they didn’t include aerosols doesn’t mean they’re useless. Aerosols might be important, but they’re not the single determining factor for climate change, there are many factors.

If your model includes most of determining factors for the system your modelling, then it’s going to produce pretty good results. There will be places where the model drifts, but you still expect the model to be pointing in pretty much the right direction. As you introduce more factors, your model starts to model details with increasing accuracy, but again you don’t expect it to substantially change the macro result.

I’m short we’re perfectly capable of knowing that the warming will happen without knowing about aerosols, the direction of travel is perfectly predictable, aerosols will only change the amount of travel, and not by an order of magnitude.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#175

Post by boppo1 »

soperj wrote: post #148
d--b wrote: post #91

The point is that warning about extreme weather events is the only narrative that got people to consider global warming a problem at all. A 2 degree change in average temperature doesn’t change how people live. A heat wave does. Now I don’t know if it’s actually true or not but it feels like the frequency of extreme weather event has increased. It’s difficult to say because that’s something our grandparents already s…

> It only benefits people running polluting industries. That's not true. It benefits anyone who can blame anything on climate change. For instance, decimation of fish stocks in the Pacific Northwest. Mostly due to dams and fish farming in the mouths of important rivers, and over fishing, but wild attributed to climate change. Massive forest fires in BC. Mostly due to forestry management practices where forests aren't…

I wish this point was more recognized.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#176

Post by avereveard »

labster wrote: post #61
contravariant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why in these discussions it's usually better to talk about specific statistics like 'the chance of a wildfire has gone up by 20%', or perhaps more clearly 'the average time between extreme floods has gone down from once every 100 years to once every 60' (which I find communicates the point a bit more clearly). That said personally I think that should be as far as the discussion goes, talking about a specific e…

As a climatologist by education and a dabbler in politics, I think you are radically misjudging the ability of most people to have rational discussions about unwelcome statistics. If you say severe weather will increase by 20% due to climate change, people will hear that there’s an 80% chance weather will stay the same. And they say I’m just being alarmist. When I say that this storm may have been enhanced by climate…

"it's not that we have to change models every five years as none of the old are tracking the present, it's everyone else that's stupid" - yeah sounds about like something a climatologist would say

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#177

Post by avereveard »

roenxi wrote: post #167
carschno wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

I was perfectly fine with the initial take - vaccine once or twice, side effects are rare.

Now that it's becoming vaccinate every six months, the outlook of the cumulative probability of side effects doesn't look that good anymore.

And, going trough an inflammatory process every six months doesn't seem good on its own, even if the vaccine wouldn't have side effect.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#178

Post by avereveard »

jounker wrote: post #163
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 d…

That you described there is not modeling, it's curve fitting. Run enough model, and one will track. It's survival bias tho, and offer very little guarantees to track the future.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#179

Post by perlgeek »

d--b wrote: post #91

The point is that warning about extreme weather events is the only narrative that got people to consider global warming a problem at all. A 2 degree change in average temperature doesn’t change how people live. A heat wave does. Now I don’t know if it’s actually true or not but it feels like the frequency of extreme weather event has increased. It’s difficult to say because that’s something our grandparents already s…

I'm pretty sure that insurance companies have hard empirical data on whether extreme weather has actually gotten more frequent.

Re: Do climate models predict extreme weather?

#180

Post by naasking »

labster wrote: post #61
contravariant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why in these discussions it's usually better to talk about specific statistics like 'the chance of a wildfire has gone up by 20%', or perhaps more clearly 'the average time between extreme floods has gone down from once every 100 years to once every 60' (which I find communicates the point a bit more clearly). That said personally I think that should be as far as the discussion goes, talking about a specific e…

As a climatologist by education and a dabbler in politics, I think you are radically misjudging the ability of most people to have rational discussions about unwelcome statistics. If you say severe weather will increase by 20% due to climate change, people will hear that there’s an 80% chance weather will stay the same. And they say I’m just being alarmist. When I say that this storm may have been enhanced by climate…

> Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way.

That's uncharitable and untrue.

> 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.

People distrust science after decades of bad science journalism and bad science communication, and you think the solution is to outright lie and undermine all of your credibility.

I'm sure that'll work just great, and it won't at all simply reinforce the beliefs of those who already agree with you while arming those you were actually trying to reach with reasons to distrust you. Not like we didn't see exactly this sort of lie backfire during the pandemic.

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