151–160 of 332 posts
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So if I asked you to bet at 50/50 odds that next year would be colder on average than this year, you'd take the bet?
Are you asking about the weather in one specific year? Weather is not climate.
If you are like me, you hate reading articles like this. You know there is a problem but you feel like you can't do anything about it. You recycle, you turn off lights, you have a programmable thermostat but you know it's a drop in the ocean. I finally decided to do something about it last fall. I researched and have committed to purchasing green power. Every month I purchase 850 kWh for $22 from Bullfrog Power (a Ca…
edit: also it is very rare to have the externalities included into the sum of CO2 emissions (dams need cement, wind turbines need steel, solar panel need mining, we need to transport these components, etc. -> all of that is probably not currently powered by CO2 neutral energy).
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Can you even imagine how a Total War economy/society based on transitioning to greener energies, cutting emissions and pollutants, and working on improvements to housing and urban planning would end up looking? Like ignoring the whole climate change thing for a moment (though we absolutely should not do that), just the quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring wou…
> 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…
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.
Does anyone know if this is actually true? I was under the impression that climate models have been mostly overshooting reality over the past 40 years > One question modeling can help answer is called “climate sensitivity,” an estimate of how much warmer the planet will be once it has adjusted to atmospheric CO₂ at double the pre-industrial level. (At current rates, CO₂ could reach a doubling point in the last decade…
I'd be curious where your impression comes from, in terms of what sources of information you're receiving.
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…
Sadly the political activists have hijacked the normal scientific process. And this allowed some pseudoscience (with alarming predictions or alarming observations) to mix in too.
In some science news I read that the Arctic Ice-sheet is growing back, and that Envisat showed that the oceans were not rising. So very likely the climate is more complex than some alarmed scientists thought.
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Total wars are not known to increase the quality of life. If a transition to a green economy guaranteed such massive economic gains (and no pains) don't you think that politicians of all colours would scramble to implement it? The first step to solving issues is to acknowledge all the difficulties that lie ahead: otherwise you end up in a delusional state in which solutions are obvious and easy and the only reason th…
The other sad conclusion to derive from this is that the "improvements to urban planning" bit is largely not happening, despite generally broad bipartisan support. It signals to me that people like complaining about things, but do not participate in politics in any productive fashion. Right now it's just team sports, and most people can not name the candidate they are voting for, outside of the presidential election,…
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It's not machine learning, it's a physical model. Computers solve a big differential equation that takes in all of the physical things we know about the Earth's climate system and runs them forward in time. The increase in thermal predictions are due to changes in the cloud and aerosol models which were made due to an improved understanding of the physics involved.
The line can be a bit blurry, because they are actually running inverse problems with the PDEs to fit the data. This needs regularization just like statistical ML models. Usually this amounts to solving an iterated least square problem, just like logistic regression. Bayesian methods are becoming more popular, though.
Could you explain this a bit more? Are you talking about data assimilation?
The impact of cloud cover in these models has been incorrect, and has such a large impact. Doesn't this strike anyone as a major problem?
We're burning about 100 billion gallons of aviation fuel per year.
> This means each gallon of jet fuel (6.5lbs) will combine with 23lbs of Oxygen and turn into twenty pounds of CO2, and just over nine pounds of water! (see: https://paullaherty.com/2015/01/10/calculating-aircraft-co2-...).
So that's 100B gallons * 9lbs is about a half a billion metric tons of water vapor going into the dry upper troposphere annually from commercial aviation.
Which, evidence would seem to suggest, has not been modeled properly (at all?) by these climate models?
If I was producing these models, I would be embarassed.
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…
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>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
My argument to this would be that changing our world because of a faulty model system would be disastrous. Because of the advancements of the last two centuries more people have had food and water and basic necessities being met then at any time in history (and yet we still have billions suffering). Worsening their lives over something that might not happen is not a good way to run the world. The models being accurat…
Climate change is happening right now, with effects that are observable as trends across the globe. Even the most optimistic model is predicting widespread catastrophe.