The Washington Nationals will win 74 games this year. The Democrats will lose five Senate seats in November. The high Tuesday will be 86 degrees, but it will feel like 84.
And, depending on how much greenhouse gas emissions increase, the world’s average temperature will rise between 2 and 11.5 degrees by 2100. The computer models used to predict climate change are far more sophisticated than the ones that forecast the weather, elections or sporting results. They are multilayered programs in which scientists try to replicate the physics behind things such as rainfall, ocean currents and the melting of sea ice. Then, they try to estimate how emissions from smokestacks and auto tailpipes might alter those patterns in the future, as the effects of warmer temperatures echo through these complex and interrelated systems.
To check these programs’ accuracy, scientists plug in data from previous years to see if the model’s predictions match what really happened. But these models still have the same caveat as other computer-generated futures. They are man-made, so their results are shaped by human judgment.
This year, critics have harped on that fact, attacking models of climate change that have been used to illustrate what will happen if the United States and other countries do nothing to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists have responded that their models are imperfect, but still provide invaluable glimpses of change to come. They have found themselves trying to persuade the public—now surrounded by computerized predictions of the future—to believe in these.
If policymakers don’t heed the models, “you’re throwing away information. And if you throw away information, then you know less about the future than we actually do,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “You can say, ‘You know what, I don’t trust the climate models, so I’m going to walk into the middle of the road with a blindfold on,’ “ Schmidt said. “But you know what, that’s not smart.” Climate scientists admit that some models overestimated how much the Earth would warm in the past decade. But they say this might just be natural variation in weather, not a disproof of their methods.
As computers have become faster and cheaper, models both simple and sophisticated have proliferated across government, business and sports, appearing to offer precise answers to questions that used to be rhetorical. How many games will the Redskins win next season? The Web site Footballoutsiders.com, which uses computers to show fans hidden dimensions of pro football, uses a model with about 80 variables. It looks at a team’s third-down conversions, the experience of its coaches, even the age of its defensive backs. No crystal balls
How much cleaner would the Chesapeake Bay be if it had twice as many oysters? The Environmental Protection Agency uses a model that divides the bay into 55,000 slices, and maps how pollution progresses through them, from upstream tributaries into the deeper waters of the Chesapeake. It could imagine thousands more oysters—which filter water as they feed—and watch cleaner water spread out via currents and tides.
But, some of the time, these electronic futures haven’t come true. The Footballoutsiders site predicted the Redskins would win 7.8 games in 2009. The real-world team won four. The EPA’s Chesapeake Bay model has been criticized repeatedly for over-optimism, for creating a virtual bay that looked cleaner than the real one. Last month, another model’s prediction was busted: a Georgia Tech professor’s computer said Kansas would win the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The Jayhawks lost in the second round. These and other models are only as smart as the scientists who build them—they rely on data that scientists have gathered about the real world, and the accuracy of estimates about how all the factors fit together (Is an experienced coach more or less important than young defensive backs?).
They also depend on the computers running them. To accurately depict how individual clouds form and disappear, for instance, the computers that model climate change would need to be a million times faster. For now, the effects of clouds have to be estimated.
But scientists say complexity doesn’t guarantee accuracy. The best test of a model is to check it against reality. “We’re never going to perfectly model reality. We would need a system as complicated as the world around us,” said Ken Fleischmann, a professor of information studies at the University of Maryland. He said scientists needed to make the uncertainties inherent in models clear: “You let people know: It’s a model. It’s not reality. We haven’t invented a crystal ball.” Scientists say they don’t need models to know that the world is warming: There is plenty of real-world evidence, gathered since the mid-1800s, to suggest that. “There’s no climate model in that conclusion,” said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. There are more than a dozen such models running around the world: mega-computers whose job is creating a virtual Earth. These usually combine a weather simulation with other programs that mimic effects of rain and sun on the land, currents in the ocean, and emissions of greenhouse gases. First, these models imagine all the factors interacting within a “grid box”—an imaginary cube of land, water and sky that might be 60 miles long and 60 miles wide.
Then, the computer imagines effects in one box spilling into the next, and so on. As the model runs, imaginary cold fronts sweep over virtual oceans, simulating weather at rates such as five years per day. In some cases, the models are re-run with different weather conditions, until a pattern emerges in global temperatures.
The pattern is the point. It is man’s signature, a guide to what could happen in the real world. All the major climate models seem to show that greenhouse gases are causing warming, climate scientists say, although they don’t agree about how much. A 2007 United Nations report cited a range of estimates from 2 to 11.5 degrees over the next century. “It’s an educated, scientifically based guess,” said Michael Winton, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “But it’s a guess nonetheless.”
Raining on their parade
But Warren Meyer, a mechanical and aerospace engineer by training who blogs at www.climate-skeptic.com, said that climate models are highly flawed. He said the scientists who build them don’t know enough about solar cycles, ocean temperatures and other things that can nudge the earth’s temperature up or down. He said that because models produce results that sound impressively exact, they can give off an air of infallibility. But, Meyer said—if the model isn’t built correctly—its results can be both precise-sounding and wrong. “The hubris that can be associated with a model is amazing, because suddenly you take this sketchy understanding of a process, and you embody it in a model,” and it appears more trustworthy, Meyer said. “It’s almost like money laundering.”
Last month, a Gallup poll provided the latest evidence of a public U-turn on climate change. Asked if the threat of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” 48 percent said yes. That was up 13 points from 2008, the highest level of skepticism since Gallup started asking the question in 1997.
But scientists say that, during this time, they have only become more certain that their models work. Put in the conditions on Earth more than 20,000 years ago: they produce an Ice Age, NASA’s Schmidt said. Put in the conditions from 1991, when a volcanic eruption filled the earth’s atmosphere with a sun-shade of dust. The models produce cooling temperatures and shifts in wind patterns, Schmidt said, just like the real world did. If the models are as flawed as critics say, Schmidt said, “You have to ask yourself, ‘How come they work?’ “ See post here.
You didn’t need a climate model to predict that Pinatubo and Cerro Hudson in 1991 would produce global cooling. We can use volcanism and factors like the ENSO, PDO, and solar to predict weather and climate weeks, months, years even decades into the future without dynamical models. Using statistical approaches we have forecast most seasons with skill well in advance the last decade. For example, the last two years, we correctly forecast a cold summer and cold winter in the US and Eurasia this year. We see a warm summer then another cold winter coming (see more here).
The Multidecadal cycles in the oceans and the sun suggest cooling decades ahead. The 213 solar cycle suggests a Dalton like minimum the next few decades augmenting the cooling. Enjoy this brief El Nino warmth while you can. Oh and ignore the tinkertoy climate models even those run on supercomputers. All they provide is false precision and are another way your government wastes your money.
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ClimateGate Goes Back to 1980 By Duncan Davidson in Wall Street Pit
Those of you who still believe that the ClimateGate scandal was just a bunch of emails in England should read this article. James Hansen of GISS appears to have systematically adjusted the historical temperature record to remove a cold patch in the ‘70s in order to exaggerate the rise since. The amount of change of 0.6 degrees is for one decade is close to the measured change for the whole century. This is vividly seen in these three snapshots of his data being modified (below, enlarged here):
Watch how the cooling trend of the 1960’s to 1970’s is steadily adjusted up so that 0.3 degrees cooler gradually becomes 0.03 warmer (notice the red and blue horizontal lines in the graphs above).
Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s
Here is what we had thought was the historic temperature, back in the mid-1970s before the deception began. Note how much warmer the ‘30s and ‘40s looked then, and how in the charts above it shrinks in significance (below, enlarged here):
The article goes on to explain how weather balloon data created the prior temperature record, and is considered very accurate. It also matches very closely to satellite data, which started in 1979. Significantly, satellite data has diverged from the surface temperature data, showing less warming, pointing to the deception.
The whole AGW edifice is built on surface temperature from three sources: Hansen's GISS, the UK's HadCRUt and the NOAA. The GISS data is now seen to be manipulated; the HadCRUt data is suspect since it is from the main sources of the ClimateGate emails; and NOAA is even warmer than both of them, suggesting manipulation there too.
Much of the rest of climate science is built on data which is now suspect. What is now seen as Garbage In, Garbage Out had been Garbage In, Gospel Out. See post here.
See an excellent reconstruction of the changes made and also a comparison of the two nearly identical warming trends of the early and late 20th century, one of which is claimed to be easily explained by natural factors but the second of which can not and must be man made here.
Those of you who still believe that the ClimateGate scandal was just a bunch of emails in England should read this article. James Hansen of GISS appears to have systematically adjusted the historical temperature record to remove a cold patch in the ‘70s in order to exaggerate the rise since. The amount of change of 0.6 degrees is for one decade is close to the measured change for the whole century. This is vividly seen in these three snapshots of his data being modified (below, enlarged here):
Watch how the cooling trend of the 1960’s to 1970’s is steadily adjusted up so that 0.3 degrees cooler gradually becomes 0.03 warmer (notice the red and blue horizontal lines in the graphs above).
Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s
Here is what we had thought was the historic temperature, back in the mid-1970s before the deception began. Note how much warmer the ‘30s and ‘40s looked then, and how in the charts above it shrinks in significance (below, enlarged here):
The article goes on to explain how weather balloon data created the prior temperature record, and is considered very accurate. It also matches very closely to satellite data, which started in 1979. Significantly, satellite data has diverged from the surface temperature data, showing less warming, pointing to the deception.
The whole AGW edifice is built on surface temperature from three sources: Hansen's GISS, the UK's HadCRUt and the NOAA. The GISS data is now seen to be manipulated; the HadCRUt data is suspect since it is from the main sources of the ClimateGate emails; and NOAA is even warmer than both of them, suggesting manipulation there too.
Much of the rest of climate science is built on data which is now suspect. What is now seen as Garbage In, Garbage Out had been Garbage In, Gospel Out. See post here.
See an excellent reconstruction of the changes made and also a comparison of the two nearly identical warming trends of the early and late 20th century, one of which is claimed to be easily explained by natural factors but the second of which can not and must be man made here.
No people on earth are more righteously Green than the Germans. They built the foundations and set the tone of the modern Green movement in, ahem, the 1930s. They invented the phrase Atomkraft Nein Danke. They were the first country to allow nasty, dangerous Sixties eco-radicals to reinvent themselves as respectable politicians. They were the first place to buy, wholesale, into the solar power con, which is why so many of their rooves - especially on churches - shimmer and glow like reflective-coated crusties at a mid-Nineties rave, while the German taxpayer is ruing the day his government ever chose to subsidise (Achtung Herr Cameron!) this fantastically pointless scheme.. (Hat tip: Robert Groezinger, et al)
So when the Germans say “Auf Wiedersehn AGW” it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice. And that’s exactly what they just have said. See for yourself in this tear-inducing glorious feature in one of their leading newspapers (enlarged here).
Der Spiegel has done a number on AGW - one of the best and most comprehensive I’ve read in any newspaper anywhere - and it could hardly be more damning.
Truly, the experience is akin to having honey (really good stuff, heather probably) licked off one’s body by nubile blonde Nibelungen.
On the recently vindicated Prof Phil Jones:
“I am 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed,” Jones says imploringly. “I did not manipulate or fabricate any data.”
His problem is that the public doesn’t trust him anymore. Since unknown hackers secretly copied 1,073 private emails between members of his research team and published them on the Internet, his credibility has been destroyed - and so has that of an entire profession that had based much of its work on his research until now.
On the politicisation of science:
Reinhard Huttl, head of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam near Berlin and the president of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, believes that basic values are now under threat. “Scientists should never be as wedded to their theories that they are no longer capable of refuting them in the light of new findings,” he says. Scientific research, Hüttl adds, is all about results, not beliefs. Unfortunately, he says, there are more and more scientists who want to be politicians.
On the Urban Heat Island Effect (complete with nice dig at the aforementioned “exonerated, give him his job back” Prof Jones)
Critics reproach Jones for not taking one factor, in particular, sufficiently into account: the growth of urban areas. Stations that used to be rural are now in cities. And because it is always warmer in cities than outside, the temperatures measured at these stations are bound to rise.
Environmental economist Ross McKitrick, one of McIntyre’s associates, examined all rapidly growing countries, in which this urban heat effect was to be expected, and found a correlation between economic growth and temperature rise. He submitted his study in time for the last IPCC report.
Jones did everything he could to suppress the publication, which was critical of him. It proved advantageous to him that he had been one of the two main authors of the temperature chapter. In one of the hacked emails, he openly admitted that he wanted to keep this interfering publication out of the IPCC report at all costs, “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
On the myth of monster storms:
The all-clear signal on the hurricane front is another setback for the IPCC. In keeping with lead author Kevin Trenberth’s predictions, the IPCC report warned that there would be more hurricanes in a greenhouse climate. One of the graphs in the IPCC report is particularly mysterious. Without specifying a source, the graph suggestively illustrates how damage caused by extreme weather increases with rising average temperatures.
When hurricane expert Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder saw the graph, he was appalled. “I would like to discover this sort of relationship myself,” he says, “but it simply isn’t supported by the facts at the moment.”
Pielke tried to find out where the graph had come from. He traced it to the chief scientist at a London firm that performs risk calculations for major insurance companies. The insurance scientist claims that the graph was never meant for publication. How the phantom graph found its way into the IPCC report is still a mystery.
Der Spiegel would never have got away with this article four years ago. But then, in 2006, according to a poll, 62 per cent of Germans surveyed answered “Yes” to the question “Are you personally afraid of climate change.” In 2010 that figure has dropped to 42 per cent, which for those of you who haven’t done the math means that the majority of Germans are now not personally afraid of climate change.
Way to go, Germans! Gott Mitt Uns and all that. Stimmt. Genau.
The meeting of Arctic states held in Chelsea, Que. earlier this week was billed as a way to spur international efforts concerning global warming and the Far North.
Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Ottawa for failing to invite more foreign governments and other stakeholders, such as aboriginal groups, that are concerned with Arctic issues.
“We need all hands on deck because there is a huge amount to do, and not much time to do it,” Clinton said in a prepared statement. “What happens in the Arctic will have broad consequences for the Earth and its climate. The melting of sea ice, glaciers and permafrost will affect people and ecosystems around the world, and understanding how these changes fit together is a task that demands international co-operation.”
Yet when it comes to understanding how the climate of the Arctic will change in coming years, scientists say Canada is falling off the map.
Last week, a climate research centre at the University of Montreal, known by the acronym ESCER, warned that such groups are being forced to close across the country.
A lack of federal funds for climate and atmospheric science has “sounded the death knell for research groups working in this field in Canada,” Rene Laprise, ESCER’s director, wrote in a statement.
His centre has lost two staff, who found government jobs after learning that their salaries would not be guaranteed past September 2010, Laprise told CTV.ca by email. Five others are expected to leave “any time,” he wrote.
Climate scientists across the country say they’re in a similar situation—with dwindling funds and poor prospects to secure more money, they’re preparing to shut down major projects while their staff seeks jobs abroad.
Financial woes
Laprise and other scientists in his field are frustrated that the 2010 federal budget, made public last month, set aside no new money for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the main source of federal funding for climate-related research.
CFCAS was founded in 2000 and has doled out $116 million on 198 research grants at universities from Victoria to Halifax.
Canadian scientists who have contributed to international initiatives such as the World Climate Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on the foundation for a large part of their research money.
And while CFCAS’s mandate runs to March 31, 2012, it hasn’t received any new cash since 2003, and the money it has received was “fully committed” two years ago.
“There are no more funds to be distributed,” Kelly Crowe, a spokesperson for the foundation, told CTV.ca by email. “Our researchers are all looking at wrapping up their projects for good.”
A spokesperson for Environment Canada said that last year, the ministry received a funding request from CFCAS for $50 million to be spent over three years. But the request hasn’t been approved.
“The government will continue to consider this proposal, in the context of our current fiscal constraints,” Tracy Lacroix-Wilson wrote in an email. “We cannot speculate on any future funding at this time.”
Brain drain
Meanwhile, climate and atmospheric science researchers have begun to leave the country.
In December, Katrin Meissner quit a tenure-track position at the University of Victoria and moved her family to Sydney, Australia. She now studies climate change at the University of New South Wales, with two other researchers who also recently left Canadian universities.
“The possible closing of the CFCAS was certainly part of it,” Meissner said, referring to her decision to leave.
Theodore Shepherd, a veteran physicist at the University of Toronto who studies atmospheric dynamics, said people like Meissner are pulling up stakes because the international landscape for climate-change funding no longer favours Canada.
When CFCAS was created in 2000, Shepherd said Canadian universities began attracting climate scientists from Europe who would otherwise have gone to the U.S.
But economic stimulus programs introduced in the wake of the recession injected cash into climate-change research in the U.S. and in many European countries. That’s made them more attractive destinations for scientists in related fields.
The situation is changing “partly because they’ve got more money, partly because we’ve got no money,” Shepherd said.
He admits he has started to look for opportunities abroad, due to persistent funding problems in Canada.
“Not super actively,” he said. “But I’m realizing it’s going to be very hard to do what I want to here.”
Atmospheric research on the Arctic, an area that experts say will be hit particularly hard by climate change, is also being threatened by federal funding problems.
James Drummond is an Oxford-educated physicist at Dalhousie University, and the principal investigator for the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, located 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole.
He expects the lab will be forced to close unless Ottawa announces additional public money to pay for salaries and operational expenses.
“At the moment, we’re operating on the principle that something will turn up,” he said by phone from Halifax. “The reality is that the funding stream has been broken.”
In recent years it has become harder to get federal money in all areas of atmospheric science, Drummond said. And while many scientists in that field don’t expect to run out of funding until later this year or early 2011, he said they need new money now in order to map out their work next year.
“It’s not research that can be turned on and off like a tap,” Drummond said.
With no additional money, he added, the issue of brain drain has become “very real” in the world of Canadian atmospheric science.
“And once those people leave it will be very hard to get them back, because they’ll say ‘well, look what happened last time.’” Read story here.
Around 300 people - including children on a school bus - have been rescued from cars trapped in snow on the Glenshane Pass near Londonderry, as severe winter storms battered parts of Britain. Police, mountain rescue and coastguards were drafted in for the operation.
Stranded drivers had initially been taken to Dungiven Leisure Centre near Londonderry, but a blackout meant the site had to be switched to the Roe Leisure Centre in nearby Limavady. Snow closes hundreds of schools and causes chaos on roads. Blizzards, gale force winds and torrential rain have hit Scotland and Northern Ireland, knocking down power lines and wreaking transport havoc.
The Met Office has issued extreme weather warnings for the two regions, forecasting more severe blizzards and severe drifting snow up to 50cm (20in) deep in parts. During the distinctly un-spring-like conditions, temperatures will remain close to zero through the day. There could also be snow flurries across high areas of England and Wales, experts said.
Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE) said between 45,000 and 48,000 customers, mainly in the west and the north, have been cut off overnight after widespread damage to its network. At one point there were 600 individual faults reported, the firm said, with the biggest disruption was in Omagh, Enniskillen, Dungannon, Londonderry, Coleraine and Ballymena.
Poor visibility and strong winds were preventing workers from climbing poles, it added. A spokesman for NIE said 450 engineers and workers were out helping restore supplies as soon as possible - and blamed the disruption on “unprecedented” weather. “We have had unprecedented weather conditions, and are working to get people reconnected as soon as possible,” he said.
“Our crews are getting back out in the field again, we have 450 staff in the field.” Colin Brown, of the Roads Service, said they expected the weather to get worse throughout the day. ‘’We are getting geared up for difficult day of rain turning to snow as we progress through the day and into the afternoon and evening.’’
Scotland saw around 22,000 homes suffer power cuts on Tuesday, with people North Ayrshire the worst hit, but most properties were reconnected during the day. People living in north-east Scotland were suffering some of the country’s worst weather today, with gale force northerly blizzards whipping up snow drifts. Big cities Glasgow and Edinburgh will see wetter conditions. Snow ploughs and gritters were out yesterday across the country after cars and lorries became stranded in snow. Ten lorries were stranded for several hours on the M90 close to Bridge of Earn in Perthshire, and two trucks also got into difficulty on the M8 near Edinburgh creating large tailbacks.
Two men also had a lucky escape after a 50ft tree fell on a car in Edinburgh city centre. The men were treated for shock but were uninjured, police said. Among the roads closed today were the A68 at Soutra Hill in Lothian and Borders, and the A96 between Huntly and Colpy in Aberdeenshire.
Train services on the East Coast main line were also suspended north of Berwick after two landslips last night. Network Rail said it was working to re-open the line today, diverting some services via Newcastle and Carlisle and using replacement buses.
Elsewhere, heavy rain led to the River Esk bursting its banks in Musselburgh. Ferry firm Stena also said its sailings between Belfast and Stranraer were being delayed or cancelled.
Steve Ellison, a forecaster with MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said the wintry weather would start to die away tonight and tomorrow, but it would remain unsettled in many parts. He said: ‘’There’s been quite a lot of snow falling over Scotland, especially over the higher ground. But places like Edinburgh can also expect a covering. ‘’It’s also going to be very windy again. ‘’A deep low pressure is moving across the UK at the moment, dragging in a lot of cold air from the north.’’ See video here. See story and more here.
