It's weird that they call it "mini ice age" then follow up with - we had one in 17th century, London got temperature below 0 in winter. Not what I imagine from the name.
Yeah, heating is usually more efficient than cooling, because energy is usually produced with some kind of heat output. All though agriculture is a serious concern; you might starve several million people in africa.
From a purely scientific view, yes, you can move energy easier than you can cool it. However, people in hot climates usually prefer cold air blowing, which takes more energy to chill.
Yes. And the greenhouse effect overall is mostly due to water in the air. But water content is very sensitive to temperature. And when CO2 level increases, that also increases water content. So water is like an amplifier for CO2 changes.
Edit: Maybe someone thinks that this is a GCC-denial argument. It's not. Water vapor is in fact the major greenhouse gas: 36% (in dry areas) to 72% (in humid areas) of total greenhouse forcing.[0]
I think that's what I read. Water vapor amplifies the green house effect of increased CO4 and CH4. And figuring out the exact forcing constant is complicated by weather patterns and cloud cover.
One of the other things that scares me is weather is chaotic. Patterns repeat year over year. But global warming could cause those patterns to change. Possibly permanently as far as human civilization goes.
The most powerful supercomputers in the world are focused on weather analysis and they can only project a few days out. Yet, some people think they've got it figured out.
Nah, it's a common talking point, but it's highly flawed.
It's like claiming that because we can't predict if the stock market will go up or down tomorrow, we can't determine whether we're in a recession or a boom time.
Short-term weather is fairly chaotic (and we've gotten a lot better at predicting it over the last 50 years). Long-term trends are different.
The most powerful supercomputers in the world are not even close in processing power of a 4 year old. Isn't it possible that some people can see patterns that the supercomputers can't?
And these people can make mistakes or be biased. If we can't predict what the weather in our hometowns will be how can we predict how will the climate change?
But doesn't that depend on how large is the pot and how much energy you're putting into boiling it? Not to mention that you also need to know the environment in the which you're trying to boil the water. If you're trying to boil the water in the middle of arctic winter, can you predict that the pot will get to over 100C if you're using just a small camping stove? :)
"Thousands" is true, but, in the specific domain of modelling the climate there are not that many people doing it.
Weather forecasting is more about interpreting the results than writing the code for the model, and, realistically there are only the British and American weather supercomputers. Everyone else is borrowing the GRIB data and then doing their own interpretations.
As for that interpretation, a surprising amount of forecasters operate much like how gamblers work.
Think of a horse racing scene, the horses and the riders have form, i.e. how they have performed in the past. Then there is the course, this may or may not suit a given horse/rider combo. Weather, time of day and other factors come into it. Not to mention the prize money and the competition.
A gambler looks at the form, the weather and works with their niche of specialist knowledge, similar with weather forecasting.
The 'bet' might be what the weather is going to be in Dudley tomorrow or in Barnstaple, or anywhere else. The goal of the forecaster is to get it right. The observations are the key to it and the GRIB forecast data is not to be considered strictly accurate. Even if it is accurate it still needs interpretation. Even with the data and an eye on the metosat images it is incredibly hard to get the likelihood of rain right.
Sometimes a step outside is needed too - with a local forecast.
The resolution of the GRIB is not that good, so if you have a town at the foot of a mountain and next to a lake, it might not have a realistic prediction. The GRIB data might be for the top of the mountain or the middle of the lake. You need an expert to actually do an educated guess as to what temperature it will be there in the morning.
Forecasters actually understand some things that are going on in the now, so a storm off Africa that goes across to the U.S seaboard as some tropical storm will come back across to the British Isles as rain. Forecasters don't tell you that there is a queue of storms heading across the Atlantic on the way to the U.S. and inevitably going to bring rain to the UK after that. But that information could inform your holiday plans for a few weeks ahead. The computer and the meteosat images might show all this but they won't interpret it for you.
Then, when you get down to it, forecasting can often be done with horse betting mentality, like a gambling addiction.
What would be cool is to have a consumer grade version of the software the weather forecasters use, where you can go forward and back in time layering up different types of data at different altitudes. But weather forecasting is like its own magic circle and it would be betrayal of sorts to share the tricks and the props with the audience.
Modeling climate change is much more complex than the simple heuristic pattern matching of the human mind. You're talking about a huge, complex, and fundamentally chaotic system; the latter property precludes the usefulness of heuristic based predictions by a 4 year old (or a human of any age).
There's a reason we run massive numerical simulations on multi billion dollar HPCs.
*Depending of course on how you define processing power. Sure, in terms of raw flops it is estimated that human brains are indeed orders of magnitude more performant than supercomputers, but for the type of operations required to simulate something like climate, humans don't come anywhere close to the accuracy or precision of results you can obtain from a gridded 3D model fed into a purpose built simulation - without which you really can't answer any but the most basic of climate change questions.
I'm not sure what the use is of comparing human processing to "the type of operations required to simulate something like climate" since predicting the weather is not something our computers are particularly good at. Why is a 3D model even necessary?
Personal anecdote: my grandmother is capable of predicting rain 1-2 days ahead of time based on smell and just "a feeling." Granted, we probably don't remember all of the times that she was wrong.
That doesn't really explain why you need a 3d model, though. If there was no important vertical process, you could get away with not resolving it. However, vertical heat transport is the entire game since the lower atmosphere is opaque to heat.
I mean, it does though. The atmosphere is a 3D volume. Parameters that you might be interested in solving for, like advection and convection, are 3D processes. Consequently, you will need a 3D grid to solve the PDEs describing these parameters.
EDIT: Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I believe we fundamentally agree and our posts describe the same reasoning in two different ways.
With many natural systems, we can understand qualitative elements of the system, at least in part. Of course, the long run general equilibrium may be quite drier.
This is a bit like comparing the use of a supercomputer as a virtual wind tunnel to a prediction like "the airplane will fall to the ground when it's engines die".
We're not talking about vague shifting definitions of "normal." We're talking about "the wettest 12 months ever recorded," in the 125 years we have data for.
125 years is still a very small amount of time to assess climate, and the quality of the data 125 years ago isn’t very good. Considering all “solutions” to the “problem” of climate change involve a radical remaking of society, it’s not unreasonable or unserious to ask for more data.
You're having a totally different discussion than all the people you replied to. Nobody above you said "this is destroying the planet and we need to guillotine the oil barons." You introduced the idea of "we don't know what normal is" when it wasn't relevant.
This is the wettest 12 months in the US on record. This is almost certainly because the global temperature has gone up significantly in the last century+.
If you want to talk about this, talk about this - don't waste time attacking imaginary points you think other people are implying.
Reminds me of the an article a while back talking about how via studying tree rings and sediment, that scientists think California experienced back-to-back 200 year droughts starting around the year 850.
If anyone is suggesting we spend taxpayer money to prepare for extreme wet seasons, then yes, we may need more data on that.
On the other hand, it is beyond doubt that global warming is happening and getting worse. Ergo, we have to seriously cut down our CO2 emission. In the year 2019, anybody who's asking for more data on that is just willfully stalling discussion.
Stop getting hung up on "radical remaking of society," because that's going to happen anyway. Whether we like it or not, society is going to be radically remade when we lose Miami and New Orleans to the sea.
> Considering all “solutions” to the “problem” of climate change involve a radical remaking of society, it’s not unreasonable or unserious to ask for more data.
We need to replace our energy sources with renewable and/or nuclear ones, we do not have to radically remake society.
Does anyone know what the odds are of experiencing a 1 in 125 year event in a 20 year time span?
I feel like sometimes weather records are given higher significance than they really are in the grand scheme of things. Not saying this is one of them, but just trying to look at things in a balanced way.
Assuming independent events (a bad assumption no doubt) then you're looking for 1 - the probability that for 20 years straight you don't have the event happening.
- E event happens in given year
- N event doesn't happen in given year
Then P(E) = 1/125. Conversely P(N) = 1-1/125.
We're looking for 1-P(NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN) = 1 - (1-1/125)^20 = 15%
Though I'm sure someone will tell me how I'm wrong
Which is fine when it doesent affect politics and just stay in the scientific as a debate, it doesent get applied to political discourse. Thats the opposite of science.
Few days out projection is hard and influenced by lots of chaotic changes. Long term trends are a completely different thing. I can't tell you what temperature will be where I live tomorrow, but I can tell you it's going to be ~30°C higher in 6 months.
But not whether its going to be 3 degrees hotter in 50 years and not whether its because of humans or natural patterns. This is the part of the story we somehow always forget.
We understand the greenhouse effect small scale very well. And we know very well, that we humans burned up many things in a short time that were underground before ... so we know there are much more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the data matches the predictions so far.
So no. Nobody knows for sure and nobody is claiming to know, what the temperature in 50 years will be. But we know that the current models predict bad things. And we know that we burned that oil. Regardles of the sun cycle, you are probably refering to.
Its called modeling not science and not science modeling in any shape or form even closely resembling ex physics.
We dont know its going to be bad, we dont know if its us or natural variation and we dont have a single scientifically demonstrated conclusion of climate change we dont know how to deal with. Modelling is NOT science, its more akin to scenarioplanning which is why the results are all over the map. If it was science on the precision of physics we didnt need modelling.
We understand greenhouse effect in a lab well, not in a chaotic non linear system like the climate.
Statistics is a part of science. It's perfectly valid to use scientific methods to arrive at: this is the current trend, this increase started at year X, given all we know right now, there's a tiny chance that this increase is not caused by this specific change. From there we can extrapolate future changes with some likelihood brackets. Then feel free to discuss the brackets, the methodology, etc. but you can't really dispute this as a scientific method.
This is literally how current drug research (well, validation) works. It would be great if we could model the entire body-drug interaction, but in the meantime the statistics we have are the best thing we have available.
Statistics is part of science but that doesent make it science just as little as math or a feather and a bowlingball does.
Science is a process with some disciplines allowing us to be very precise and others not so much.
Climate science is a very imprecise type of science with so much uncertainty that all we can do is offer ranges of output based on ranges of initial conditions, we dont even know which conditions are correct and we dont know what we are missing. Even the data we put into the models are highly debatable, and then we havent even added the fact that 125 years is not some objective way to measure naural vs human made influence.
But sure as usual just downvote all you want, that doesent make computer models or statistics any more science.
"But sure as usual just downvote all you want, that doesent make computer models or statistics any more science."
As usual. Ignorance, while feeling self righteous. But out of curiosity, have you actually studied some science, that you can make such bold claims, that computer models and statistics have nothing todo with science?
But maybe a different way: you really believe that all what humanity does, has no influence on the climate?
Or in other words, what part of the greenhouse effect, does not make sense to you?
I have studied how the computer models work yes. And i know what the difference between what is speculated and what is demonstrated and what is demonstrated in a lab under controlled circumstances and then what can be demonstrated in a non linear chaotic system like the climate.
There is nothing about the greenhouse effect that doesent make sense to me, the problem i have is with claims about what computer modeling can be used for.
"problem i have is with claims about what computer modeling can be used for. "
Ok, we agree on that. But so far I only heird weird claims from the media, activist and politician side. The actual scientists do point out the limitations of their models. But still, if the overwhelming majority of the involved scientists say all their models and data does indeed point to human made climate change and warming ... then maybe there is something to it?
Their data don't point to that, they are interpreting the data as if it does which there isn't any scientific evidence to support. Only speculation (it could be other things like the sun, natural variation and so many other things which they haven't been able to rule out)
It uses them all the time to explore not to conclude. If all the conditions were known then it would be one single equation. Modeling is sign of too many unknowns not of certainty.
The widespread willful ignorance about the differences between modeling weather and climate was amusing to me 20 years ago. But the joke is long past its sell-by date.
No, we can't predict whether it will rain on this day in August in Augusta Georgia. Detailed forecasts will probably never get a lot better a month out. But we can predict that December 2019 will be colder than August 2019 across most of the USA, and that 2020 will be warmer than 1980 was. And those forecasts are getting better over time.
Not really. The delta in how data is collected in August and December is much smaller than 1980 to 2020. So such determinations aren’t as straightforward as you imply.
Not to mention none of the catastrophic climate consequences predicted in 1980 came to pass, but somehow we are supposed to be so much more certain about the prognosticators of today.
Which predicted catastrophes? The only one I remember is the ozone layer issue which we stopped with regulation and still pay the price (although it's getting better)
I'd take some convincing that anyone actually thinks a terrible movie that had a thousand metres, or whatever it was, of sea level rise is a real possibility.
We're "only" looking at a rise under 100m even if we lose both ice caps. Which would take centuries to fully melt... Would still end up being catastrophic for the society we built.
Yeah, but we ignore those people when taking about real world. There's a difference between "believed in a catastrophic movie" and predictions based on real information.
You ever see the Reptilian conspiracy theories? Some people actually believe that to be a possibility.
Do you have any evidence that a significant portion of people working in the field in the 1980s thought that Waterworld was realistic, or are you just pointing at some cranks that existed, and treating it as evidence of anything other than the existence of cranks?
> Not to mention none of the catastrophic climate consequences predicted in 1980 came to pass
Yes, AGW which was observed and predicted to get worse in 1980 and even earlier has come to pass largely as predicted.
The catastrophic effects of ozome depletion didn't occur because of massive steps to counteract it, like banning CFCs. So that can't be what you are talking about.
You are probably trying to reference the fringe theory of an impending ice age which got a lot of popular media attention despite being (or perhaps precisely because it was) a fringe theory, but... that's a broken analogy for obvious reasons.
The "catastrophic climate consequences predicted in 1980" is pure propaganda.
Even as far back as 1970, climate predictions in papers were overwhelmingly for warming, not cooling. And those which predicted cooling were focused on the effects of smog. However smog has largely disappeared thanks to environmental regulations enforced by organizations such as the EPA, and with it its localized cooling effects. By 1980, predictions of cooling were essentially gone from the scientific literature.
However every last report that can be found of someone predicting cooling in any context (eg nuclear winter) gets press along with the message that those darned scientists were wrong again. The fact that they were always a minority view doesn't.
The charitable interpretation would be the catastrophic predictions in the "1980s", such as around the time AGW became widely publicized with Hansen's papers and testimony and UN efforts.
"[Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program]...says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000...governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years,"
June 29, 1989
There is a big difference between 1 degree in 30 years (slightly above what has been observed, mostly beneficial) and 7 degrees in 30 years (catastrophe).
Note that the "10-year window" (and often shorter times) has been repeatedly invoked and repeatedly blown past throughout the 30 years. As Douglas Adams says — 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.' This has come from scientists (Peter Wadhams Arctic ice free by 2016), UN IPCC (Himalayan glaciers by 2035), political figures (Al Gore 10 years/12 years, Ocasio-Cortez 12-years), and celebrities (Prince Charles!? 96-months).
James Hansen speculated (1988/1989) that "West Side Highway...will be underwater" - about 20 foot sea level rise, but sea level rise has remained constant at about a foot per century. Also droughts (have to ask for water), increased crime, and boarded up windows because of wind speed. Note that this was reported as "in 20 years" - so 2009 - by Salon https://www.salon.com/2001/10/23/weather/ reporting the 1988/1989 interview, but after this article was highlighted by skeptics, Hansen corrected the numbers saying it was for 40 years and with a doubling of CO2 (which would be really fast and outside the bounds of even the extreme scenarios) - http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_Singing...
Both sides tend to exaggerate their positions and ignore contrary evidence. Both skeptics and advocates tend to focus on "Scenario A" - the extreme, unrealistic worst-case scenario - rather than the more realistic moderate emissions, moderate warming scenarios.
I wish both AGW proponents and skeptics would call out inaccuracies - even from "their own side". For instance, the IPCC's "Himalayan glaciers gone by 2035" was initially defended and widely publicized before being forced to be acknowledged as an error years later https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-him... The exaggerated sea-level rise predictions in the Salon article above stood uncorrected for years until it was called out by skeptics, then Hansen clarified the "40 years and doubled CO2".
Yes, there was a delay in effects during the 80s. I'm guessing that we can thank China for that. They pumped a shitload of SOx into the atmosphere. Some of it formed a high-altitude haze, which reflected enough sunlight to offset warming from increased CO2.
But China is releasing less SOx now. And it gets washed out of the atmosphere much faster than CO2 does. So the fit is hitting the shan now.
I present to you a person who thinks that because we can't tell for certain that it's going to rain next Wednesday, we're have no idea if next summer will be hotter than next winter.
Normally, charity in an interpretation means that there's a way that it could be taken where it makes sense. I don't think that's the case for this comment.
The most charitable interpretation I have is that the original poster is a paid shill -- in other words, they're bright enough to realize what they're saying is idiotic, but they're just doing a job to put food on the table. It'd take some evidence to sway me to that view.
I don't agree with their comment. But after looking at their comment history, I see no evidence for them being "a paid shill". Contrarian and outspoken, sure. But not a shill.
That's a pretty good analogy, but the question is: will you lose your bankroll in 20 minutes, or an hour, or 12 hours, or a week?
Climate models are doing the equivalent of trying to figure out when you're going to broke, which (although much easier than figuring what cards you will get) is still a tough question to answer.
It is yet another (and much easier) question whether we should be gambling with the habitability of the one and only planet available to us, especially when technological advances are beginning to offer a way out.
That depends on the region. As a well-known example, rainfall in California will decrease.
Here is an explanation. Take a pot of water. Heat one side. The water will start to circulate, come up where it is hot, fall where it is not, then cycle back.
The Earth's atmosphere does that as well. It rises in the tropics, spreads out, falls in temperate zones, then comes in. These circulation patterns are called the Hadley cells. They explain a lot of things. For example air that came from the equator, then spread out, is moving faster than the ground below it. That's the jet stream. And where it falls it is still moving. That sets up the prevailing wind on land, and the trade winds at sea.
One thing that they help explain is where things are dry. You see when air rises, the water falls out. So where air comes down, it is dry. Therefore the latitudes where it falls have lots of deserts.
Now one of the effects of global warming is that the Hadley cells get less stable, and also expand. Which means that arid zones in Mexico move north, and the Southern USA gets drier. But this comes with more instability in weather patterns.
So you see, it is complicated. Overall wetter does not mean wetter where you are...
Some, yes, I've read. Africa and Indonesia may get wetter, and the Sahara could even switch back to rainforest.
But my "more water, so wetter" comment was about global averages. Given that global air and ocean circulation will change, some areas will probably get drier. Such as the US Midwest and Southwest, and perhaps the Amazon.
Its not that I disagree, I just want to point out this never explains what was going on the last time the records were hit and by proxy a snapshot of the current record
The interesting side effects are the formation of more clouds (in the stratosphere they make things warmer, in the troposphere they make things colder), and bigger temperature shifts in the air when the water finally condenses out in liquid form (more mass to phase change, more net temperature change).
Its changing the climate so no, there is probably no record setting weather it cant account for. Even if this was less water it would be listed as the driest 12 months on record.
In the weather/climate realm, effects of increasing CO2, CH4, etc arguably dominate. Next important, I think, are changes in land use. Such as heat island effects of cities. Or deforestation reducing local to regional rainfall.
So yeah. In areas that are getting warmer, such as the Arctic, new records will be about high temperatures and less sea ice cover. In areas that are getting drier, it'll be about drought. And in areas that are getting wetter, it'll be about flooding.
Are they using the same models that also predict colder winters, hotter summers, and more droughts?
I feel like everyones making different assumptions when building their climate models, so you end up with a model that show more intense A & B but not C, and than another model showing more intense A & C but no change in B, and a third mentions only a change in B and something about D, but by the time it makes it to the general populace the only thing anyone sees is that climate change is causing A, B, C, D, E, and F. Not to their fault, but with complex models like climate, a small change can butterfly wildly.
The problem with this is that it’s trying to imply that these changes happen, and mere happenstance says climate change explains them.
Rather than saying: climate change predicts increased extremes of all weather patterns, increased average global temperature, and increased melting of the polar ice caps. These predictions can be made robustly using fairly basic assumptions. So yeah, we can say that we will keep getting these records, and they will occur more frequently, because of human driven climate change.
Yes. Weather variance is higher, but the fact is that record highs far outnumber record lows. If record lows were in greater supply it would help falsify the theory that the global average temperature is going up.
So US-only warming instead of global? Confused. Admittedly I may not understand, is US is expected to be impacted differently by global warming than other countries?
The landmass of North America will experience different effects of climate change than other landmasses. There might be similarities between it and other areas, like South America, but South America has a large cold continent to it's south while North America has a small cold ocean to it's north.
No, trying to understand whenever someone sees "it rained alot" and equates it to death of the world and reconcile it with a basis in science. Interested in long term climate change and how the latest is impacting what we see. Not blindly accepting internet rants, trying to think of it scientifically instead of "rain = we dying"
Some areas in the US already have a short growing season as it is. If excessive rains in say, Montana, push back the planting times of wheat and other grains the plants might not be ready to harvest before Fall and Winter weather kills them.
In Montana most wheat is planted in the late summer and fall. In most of USA ag areas, spring rains are more challenging for corn and beans than for wheat.
Does anyone know where to get data for macro weather trends like these? I am curious what regions will have the most ideal weather in the next few years.
It depends on what model you believe will occur. If you believe in cyclic climate changes, then the old "green" regions will come back. If that's the case, the fertile crescent & old roman grow areas (North Africa) & American Southwest will have a greening.
Another factor that has been observed is the changes in the jetstreams. This past winter there were Polar vortexes leading to cold temperatures. Europe was recently hit with an Equatorial vortex leading to a heat wave.
Good luck with that, all the climate change predictions fail after a while because they got no clue what is going to happen even next week, let alone in the next couple of years or decades. Just ignore all this noise, it is too complicated system to predict.
No, floods just wash by, eroding top soil and often decreasing future aquifer replenishment because there is less to hold on to the water to give it time to soak down into the aquifer.
Last October in Austin, there was a bitter irony: after heavy rains, the systems for filtering the water were overloaded and they put out a warning that water wasn't safe to drink (though fine for other purposes).
"Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
In many areas, not appreciably. Aquifer contraction and all the pavement lain in the past century end up blocking a lot of absorption. A recent 99% Invisible episode talked about this, focusing on Mexico City's aquifer situation:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/depave-paradise/
What if new tropical paradises means the current tropical paradises become uninhabitable, creating more forced migrations that make the syrian refugee crisis look like a quiet day on the canadian border, and the lands that become your "tropical paradise" actually are the grain belts of the world, which can no longer grow all the food a continuously expanding global population demands?
Look at all the flooding in the midwest this year -- despite dams on every major river, we've still had record-breaking field inundation and crop failure. Is that the new normal paradise you're describing?
We also have financialization of markets, which allows manipulation. The USDA has also made some controversial assessments with readjustments of the corn production forecast. Currently, 31 million corn acres are deemed unplanted this year. One can read the trends to see the writing on the wall...
Gold & Silver have also been kept artificially low & there is incoming indictments of market rigging. I add this as an example of how financialization distorts the pricing information flow.
About 80 percent of bugs have died in Peurto Rico rain forest attributed to global warming. We are in the 6th mass extinction. It won't be a tropical paradise without bugs, birds, animals, and the ability to grow food.
EDIT: I found this from NOAA -> Earth’s long-term warming trend continued in 2018 as persistent warmth across large swaths of land and ocean resulted in the globe’s fourth hottest year in NOAA’s 139-year climate record.
So the implication is that this is that maybe this is the wettest 12 months since 1879?
I wonder if water export can become an industry in the same manner as petroleum or natural gas? With solar power getting so inexpensive I wonder if we could fill a very slow solar power tanker and ship it to the middle east at costs lower than desalinization? Thoughts anyone?
It might not be so crazy. At one-time shipping ice around the world was a thing.
So they are saying one iceberg could provide 100 million and 200 million m3 of water. According to wikipedia that's the global oil tanker transport load for a year and the largest tanker can load up 550k m3.
It's also interesting what effect moving 200m m3 of ice to a desert climate would have on local climate.
Even if their plan is unrealistic it sort of puts things in perspective in terms of quantities of water available.
Desalinization also has externalities that aren't priced in but would make sense to consider. That's a fancy way of saying that the salt removed from the water creates a brine that in large quantities is no bueno to just dump somewhere.
The Earth's magnetosphere & Sun's Heliosphere are measurably weakened due to the Grand Solar Minimum. The Earth is also going through a magnetic pole reversal. These magnetic fields shield Earth from cosmic rays. If they are weaker, Earth will be bombarded by cosmic rays.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadThat said, we're much better setup to increase total entropy in the atmosphere than decrease it (via heat sinks eg)
Edit: Maybe someone thinks that this is a GCC-denial argument. It's not. Water vapor is in fact the major greenhouse gas: 36% (in dry areas) to 72% (in humid areas) of total greenhouse forcing.[0]
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_gase...
One of the other things that scares me is weather is chaotic. Patterns repeat year over year. But global warming could cause those patterns to change. Possibly permanently as far as human civilization goes.
It's like claiming that because we can't predict if the stock market will go up or down tomorrow, we can't determine whether we're in a recession or a boom time.
Short-term weather is fairly chaotic (and we've gotten a lot better at predicting it over the last 50 years). Long-term trends are different.
Weather forecasting is more about interpreting the results than writing the code for the model, and, realistically there are only the British and American weather supercomputers. Everyone else is borrowing the GRIB data and then doing their own interpretations.
As for that interpretation, a surprising amount of forecasters operate much like how gamblers work.
Think of a horse racing scene, the horses and the riders have form, i.e. how they have performed in the past. Then there is the course, this may or may not suit a given horse/rider combo. Weather, time of day and other factors come into it. Not to mention the prize money and the competition.
A gambler looks at the form, the weather and works with their niche of specialist knowledge, similar with weather forecasting.
The 'bet' might be what the weather is going to be in Dudley tomorrow or in Barnstaple, or anywhere else. The goal of the forecaster is to get it right. The observations are the key to it and the GRIB forecast data is not to be considered strictly accurate. Even if it is accurate it still needs interpretation. Even with the data and an eye on the metosat images it is incredibly hard to get the likelihood of rain right.
Sometimes a step outside is needed too - with a local forecast.
The resolution of the GRIB is not that good, so if you have a town at the foot of a mountain and next to a lake, it might not have a realistic prediction. The GRIB data might be for the top of the mountain or the middle of the lake. You need an expert to actually do an educated guess as to what temperature it will be there in the morning.
Forecasters actually understand some things that are going on in the now, so a storm off Africa that goes across to the U.S seaboard as some tropical storm will come back across to the British Isles as rain. Forecasters don't tell you that there is a queue of storms heading across the Atlantic on the way to the U.S. and inevitably going to bring rain to the UK after that. But that information could inform your holiday plans for a few weeks ahead. The computer and the meteosat images might show all this but they won't interpret it for you.
Then, when you get down to it, forecasting can often be done with horse betting mentality, like a gambling addiction.
What would be cool is to have a consumer grade version of the software the weather forecasters use, where you can go forward and back in time layering up different types of data at different altitudes. But weather forecasting is like its own magic circle and it would be betrayal of sorts to share the tricks and the props with the audience.
Modeling climate change is much more complex than the simple heuristic pattern matching of the human mind. You're talking about a huge, complex, and fundamentally chaotic system; the latter property precludes the usefulness of heuristic based predictions by a 4 year old (or a human of any age).
There's a reason we run massive numerical simulations on multi billion dollar HPCs.
*Depending of course on how you define processing power. Sure, in terms of raw flops it is estimated that human brains are indeed orders of magnitude more performant than supercomputers, but for the type of operations required to simulate something like climate, humans don't come anywhere close to the accuracy or precision of results you can obtain from a gridded 3D model fed into a purpose built simulation - without which you really can't answer any but the most basic of climate change questions.
Personal anecdote: my grandmother is capable of predicting rain 1-2 days ahead of time based on smell and just "a feeling." Granted, we probably don't remember all of the times that she was wrong.
See [0]. PDEs can be solved discreetly in three dimensions on a three-dimensional grid (3D model, sort of).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_volume_method
EDIT: Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I believe we fundamentally agree and our posts describe the same reasoning in two different ways.
With many natural systems, we can understand qualitative elements of the system, at least in part. Of course, the long run general equilibrium may be quite drier.
This is the wettest 12 months in the US on record. This is almost certainly because the global temperature has gone up significantly in the last century+.
If you want to talk about this, talk about this - don't waste time attacking imaginary points you think other people are implying.
On the other hand, it is beyond doubt that global warming is happening and getting worse. Ergo, we have to seriously cut down our CO2 emission. In the year 2019, anybody who's asking for more data on that is just willfully stalling discussion.
Stop getting hung up on "radical remaking of society," because that's going to happen anyway. Whether we like it or not, society is going to be radically remade when we lose Miami and New Orleans to the sea.
We need to replace our energy sources with renewable and/or nuclear ones, we do not have to radically remake society.
I feel like sometimes weather records are given higher significance than they really are in the grand scheme of things. Not saying this is one of them, but just trying to look at things in a balanced way.
- E event happens in given year - N event doesn't happen in given year
Then P(E) = 1/125. Conversely P(N) = 1-1/125.
We're looking for 1-P(NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN) = 1 - (1-1/125)^20 = 15%
Though I'm sure someone will tell me how I'm wrong
But we compare to things that we know about, instead of guessing.
We understand the greenhouse effect small scale very well. And we know very well, that we humans burned up many things in a short time that were underground before ... so we know there are much more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the data matches the predictions so far.
So no. Nobody knows for sure and nobody is claiming to know, what the temperature in 50 years will be. But we know that the current models predict bad things. And we know that we burned that oil. Regardles of the sun cycle, you are probably refering to.
We dont know its going to be bad, we dont know if its us or natural variation and we dont have a single scientifically demonstrated conclusion of climate change we dont know how to deal with. Modelling is NOT science, its more akin to scenarioplanning which is why the results are all over the map. If it was science on the precision of physics we didnt need modelling.
We understand greenhouse effect in a lab well, not in a chaotic non linear system like the climate.
This is literally how current drug research (well, validation) works. It would be great if we could model the entire body-drug interaction, but in the meantime the statistics we have are the best thing we have available.
Science is a process with some disciplines allowing us to be very precise and others not so much.
Climate science is a very imprecise type of science with so much uncertainty that all we can do is offer ranges of output based on ranges of initial conditions, we dont even know which conditions are correct and we dont know what we are missing. Even the data we put into the models are highly debatable, and then we havent even added the fact that 125 years is not some objective way to measure naural vs human made influence.
But sure as usual just downvote all you want, that doesent make computer models or statistics any more science.
As usual. Ignorance, while feeling self righteous. But out of curiosity, have you actually studied some science, that you can make such bold claims, that computer models and statistics have nothing todo with science?
But maybe a different way: you really believe that all what humanity does, has no influence on the climate?
Or in other words, what part of the greenhouse effect, does not make sense to you?
There is nothing about the greenhouse effect that doesent make sense to me, the problem i have is with claims about what computer modeling can be used for.
Ok, we agree on that. But so far I only heird weird claims from the media, activist and politician side. The actual scientists do point out the limitations of their models. But still, if the overwhelming majority of the involved scientists say all their models and data does indeed point to human made climate change and warming ... then maybe there is something to it?
No, we can't predict whether it will rain on this day in August in Augusta Georgia. Detailed forecasts will probably never get a lot better a month out. But we can predict that December 2019 will be colder than August 2019 across most of the USA, and that 2020 will be warmer than 1980 was. And those forecasts are getting better over time.
That's reality. Deal with it.
Not to mention none of the catastrophic climate consequences predicted in 1980 came to pass, but somehow we are supposed to be so much more certain about the prognosticators of today.
We're "only" looking at a rise under 100m even if we lose both ice caps. Which would take centuries to fully melt... Would still end up being catastrophic for the society we built.
Do you have any evidence that a significant portion of people working in the field in the 1980s thought that Waterworld was realistic, or are you just pointing at some cranks that existed, and treating it as evidence of anything other than the existence of cranks?
Evil dolphin overlords, perhaps?
Yes, AGW which was observed and predicted to get worse in 1980 and even earlier has come to pass largely as predicted.
The catastrophic effects of ozome depletion didn't occur because of massive steps to counteract it, like banning CFCs. So that can't be what you are talking about.
You are probably trying to reference the fringe theory of an impending ice age which got a lot of popular media attention despite being (or perhaps precisely because it was) a fringe theory, but... that's a broken analogy for obvious reasons.
Even as far back as 1970, climate predictions in papers were overwhelmingly for warming, not cooling. And those which predicted cooling were focused on the effects of smog. However smog has largely disappeared thanks to environmental regulations enforced by organizations such as the EPA, and with it its localized cooling effects. By 1980, predictions of cooling were essentially gone from the scientific literature.
However every last report that can be found of someone predicting cooling in any context (eg nuclear winter) gets press along with the message that those darned scientists were wrong again. The fact that they were always a minority view doesn't.
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
"[Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program]...says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000...governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years,"
June 29, 1989
There is a big difference between 1 degree in 30 years (slightly above what has been observed, mostly beneficial) and 7 degrees in 30 years (catastrophe).
Note that the "10-year window" (and often shorter times) has been repeatedly invoked and repeatedly blown past throughout the 30 years. As Douglas Adams says — 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.' This has come from scientists (Peter Wadhams Arctic ice free by 2016), UN IPCC (Himalayan glaciers by 2035), political figures (Al Gore 10 years/12 years, Ocasio-Cortez 12-years), and celebrities (Prince Charles!? 96-months).
James Hansen speculated (1988/1989) that "West Side Highway...will be underwater" - about 20 foot sea level rise, but sea level rise has remained constant at about a foot per century. Also droughts (have to ask for water), increased crime, and boarded up windows because of wind speed. Note that this was reported as "in 20 years" - so 2009 - by Salon https://www.salon.com/2001/10/23/weather/ reporting the 1988/1989 interview, but after this article was highlighted by skeptics, Hansen corrected the numbers saying it was for 40 years and with a doubling of CO2 (which would be really fast and outside the bounds of even the extreme scenarios) - http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_Singing...
Hansen also predicted (1988) strengthening hurricanes (no trend observed, despite warming, media attention, and increased observation) https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/07/us/ferocious-storms-and-d...
Both sides tend to exaggerate their positions and ignore contrary evidence. Both skeptics and advocates tend to focus on "Scenario A" - the extreme, unrealistic worst-case scenario - rather than the more realistic moderate emissions, moderate warming scenarios.
I wish both AGW proponents and skeptics would call out inaccuracies - even from "their own side". For instance, the IPCC's "Himalayan glaciers gone by 2035" was initially defended and widely publicized before being forced to be acknowledged as an error years later https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-him... The exaggerated sea-level rise predictions in the Salon article above stood uncorrected for years until it was called out by skeptics, then Hansen clarified the "40 years and doubled CO2".
But China is releasing less SOx now. And it gets washed out of the atmosphere much faster than CO2 does. So the fit is hitting the shan now.
The most charitable interpretation I have is that the original poster is a paid shill -- in other words, they're bright enough to realize what they're saying is idiotic, but they're just doing a job to put food on the table. It'd take some evidence to sway me to that view.
I don't agree with their comment. But after looking at their comment history, I see no evidence for them being "a paid shill". Contrarian and outspoken, sure. But not a shill.
Climate models are doing the equivalent of trying to figure out when you're going to broke, which (although much easier than figuring what cards you will get) is still a tough question to answer.
Here is an explanation. Take a pot of water. Heat one side. The water will start to circulate, come up where it is hot, fall where it is not, then cycle back.
The Earth's atmosphere does that as well. It rises in the tropics, spreads out, falls in temperate zones, then comes in. These circulation patterns are called the Hadley cells. They explain a lot of things. For example air that came from the equator, then spread out, is moving faster than the ground below it. That's the jet stream. And where it falls it is still moving. That sets up the prevailing wind on land, and the trade winds at sea.
One thing that they help explain is where things are dry. You see when air rises, the water falls out. So where air comes down, it is dry. Therefore the latitudes where it falls have lots of deserts.
Now one of the effects of global warming is that the Hadley cells get less stable, and also expand. Which means that arid zones in Mexico move north, and the Southern USA gets drier. But this comes with more instability in weather patterns.
So you see, it is complicated. Overall wetter does not mean wetter where you are...
But my "more water, so wetter" comment was about global averages. Given that global air and ocean circulation will change, some areas will probably get drier. Such as the US Midwest and Southwest, and perhaps the Amazon.
https://news.uci.edu/2018/04/27/scientists-project-a-drier-a...
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/34232/201...
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1600873.full
I'm willing to wager it's the same thing going on as "last time."
The interesting side effects are the formation of more clouds (in the stratosphere they make things warmer, in the troposphere they make things colder), and bigger temperature shifts in the air when the water finally condenses out in liquid form (more mass to phase change, more net temperature change).
So yeah. In areas that are getting warmer, such as the Arctic, new records will be about high temperatures and less sea ice cover. In areas that are getting drier, it'll be about drought. And in areas that are getting wetter, it'll be about flooding.
It doesn’t matter whether or not they are actually caused by climate change.
It’s a level of annoying to me similar to when my dad uses a cold winter as evidence that there is no warming going on.
I feel like everyones making different assumptions when building their climate models, so you end up with a model that show more intense A & B but not C, and than another model showing more intense A & C but no change in B, and a third mentions only a change in B and something about D, but by the time it makes it to the general populace the only thing anyone sees is that climate change is causing A, B, C, D, E, and F. Not to their fault, but with complex models like climate, a small change can butterfly wildly.
Rather than saying: climate change predicts increased extremes of all weather patterns, increased average global temperature, and increased melting of the polar ice caps. These predictions can be made robustly using fairly basic assumptions. So yeah, we can say that we will keep getting these records, and they will occur more frequently, because of human driven climate change.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...
Are you trying to imply that global warming isn't happening?
Know any good resources to get more info?
Some areas in the US already have a short growing season as it is. If excessive rains in say, Montana, push back the planting times of wheat and other grains the plants might not be ready to harvest before Fall and Winter weather kills them.
Another factor that has been observed is the changes in the jetstreams. This past winter there were Polar vortexes leading to cold temperatures. Europe was recently hit with an Equatorial vortex leading to a heat wave.
"Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
Story about it:
https://patch.com/texas/downtownaustin/austin-water-safe-dri...
Look at all the flooding in the midwest this year -- despite dams on every major river, we've still had record-breaking field inundation and crop failure. Is that the new normal paradise you're describing?
https://www.macrotrends.net/2534/wheat-prices-historical-cha...
https://www.agweb.com/article/crunch-time-31-million-corn-ac...
Gold & Silver have also been kept artificially low & there is incoming indictments of market rigging. I add this as an example of how financialization distorts the pricing information flow.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/merrill-lynch-fined-by-doj...
And what if the shift happens so fast there isnt enough time for all of the tropical plant life to migrate with the temperature changes?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
EDIT: I found this from NOAA -> Earth’s long-term warming trend continued in 2018 as persistent warmth across large swaths of land and ocean resulted in the globe’s fourth hottest year in NOAA’s 139-year climate record.
So the implication is that this is that maybe this is the wettest 12 months since 1879?
It might not be so crazy. At one-time shipping ice around the world was a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
So they are saying one iceberg could provide 100 million and 200 million m3 of water. According to wikipedia that's the global oil tanker transport load for a year and the largest tanker can load up 550k m3.
It's also interesting what effect moving 200m m3 of ice to a desert climate would have on local climate.
Even if their plan is unrealistic it sort of puts things in perspective in terms of quantities of water available.
Desalinization also has externalities that aren't priced in but would make sense to consider. That's a fancy way of saying that the salt removed from the water creates a brine that in large quantities is no bueno to just dump somewhere.
https://principia-scientific.org/strong-evidence-that-svensm...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg3MqdBX0_k
The Earth's magnetosphere & Sun's Heliosphere are measurably weakened due to the Grand Solar Minimum. The Earth is also going through a magnetic pole reversal. These magnetic fields shield Earth from cosmic rays. If they are weaker, Earth will be bombarded by cosmic rays.
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/04/23/a-perfect-storm-o...
The other planets in the solar system are have observed effects of cosmic ray bombardment.
https://www.space.com/39590-jupiter-great-red-spot-color-sti...
A model backed by physical experimental evidence & reliable observations is the basis of the scientific process.