Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Stop trying to win this politically (Score 1) 786

You're going back to short term thinking again. If you're working off a 30 year running mean then the "pause" doesn't even come in to play. On top of that "pause" is a misnomer. Ocean warming where over 90% of the added energy always goes has not slowed down. It's also a misnomer because although the slope of the warming curve is lower in the 2000's than it was in the 1980's and 1990's warming has continued. In several of the temperature records 2005 and 2010 are the warmest year and 2014 will likely set a new record once they finish crunching the numbers. Finally as I've said you can't expect a climate model to take into account the effects of natural variability since they're impossible to predict ahead of time. Again I direct you to this article about a paper where they selected model runs that just happened by coincidence to have representations of ENSO closer to real world observations of ENSO and it turned out they also modeled real world temperature better too.

Comment Re:illegal taxi:$100 Obstruction of justice: jail (Score 1) 299

Restaurants have the ability to ban customers and refuse them entry to the premises (it is private property) ...

Restaurants and other "open to the public" businesses have very limited ability to ban customers and refuse them entry (in the US at least). They are not allowed to refuse service on the basis of race, sex, religion, and lately sexual orientation. They can refuse service to people for things like not wearing a shirt.

Comment Re:Stop trying to win this politically (Score 1) 786

A climate model isn't based on any time period. It's based on physics.

As I said AGW started in the late 1700's when people started burning significant quantities of fossil fuels. The usage was small enough until the late 1800's/early 1900's that it didn't cause noticeable climate change that can be attributed to anthropogenic effects until sometime in the 1900's.

The falsifiable test for the climate models is obvious. You're just too impatient to wait for it to play out (and I am too for different reasons). The falsifiable test is to compare the 30 year running mean of surface temperature observations to the model output. If the model output gets and stays too far afield of the observations then the model is falsified. So far they haven't.

Comment Re:Stop trying to win this politically (Score 1) 786

Hmm... As I suspected you don't really understand climate models and their limitations. Climate models aren't expected to predict a 10 year period. That's more akin to a weather prediction than a climate prediction. As I have said the standard period for climatology is 30 years.

In fact it's impossible at the present time and may never be possible to produce a climate model that would accurately (to your standards) predict a 10 year period. That's because it's impossible to predict ahead of time the natural variability of things like ENSO and volcanic activity (to name a couple of the big ones). If no one can predict ahead of time the phases of ENSO and volcanic activity how can you expect a climate model to factor them in to its predictions.

The thing about natural variability is its mostly quasi-cyclical stuff (with the possible exception of volcanic activity). That is natural variability factors like ENSO and other ocean oscillations cycle from one extreme to the other over time periods that are not precisely predictable but in the long run their effects net out to near zero. 30 years is the minimum time period for that to happen for the most part.

A note on terminology: Climate models make projections, not predictions. I used "predictions" above to avoid confusing you. They are called projections because many of the real world factors that affect climate like natural variability are not predictable ahead of time and how the level of CO2 in the atmosphere rises depends on what we may or may not do to reduce emissions. So they feed realistic simulations of them to the model and the output is a projection of what will happen if the real world matches the simulation. They run the model many times with different realistic simulations to capture the full range of possibilities of the evolution of climate and what the public mostly sees is graphs of all of the model runs averaged together with uncertainty bars that cover the range and variability of the different runs.

Which brings up a scientific study that was published in Nature last year. Nature is paywalled but here is an article on it by one of its authors.

The gist of the study is that when they selected individual model runs where the realistic simulations of ENSO coincidentally happened to match well with real time observations of ENSO the models temperature output matched up well with real world observations of temperature (maybe even good enough to satisfy you). When they selected model runs where the realistic simulations least matched the real world the temperature projections were way off.

AGW is not based on temperature observations at all. It's based on the radiative absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide and the expected side effects of that. It started at the dawn of human industrialization in the late 1700's although the effect was small enough until some time in the early 1900's to hardly be noticeable.

Comment Re:Stop trying to win this politically (Score 1) 786

LOL, maybe I deserved that.

Going back you say "I'm asking you to show me any earth climate model that has been subjected to empirical testing and survived." So far I've been just assuming what you mean by "empirical testing" but why don't you get more specific about what you mean. How close does the temperature output of models need to be to satisfy you? What about precipitation, winds, absolute humidity? What kind of time scales are you using for the comparison?

I have to say as far as my understanding of what climate models are capable of they are working fairly well. For scientists it's not a binary question of whether they're right or wrong but whether they help us better understand the complex interactions that make up the climate. As George Box famously said "All models are wrong but some are useful." I think climate models are more useful than any other approach we have to the problem. You appear to be saying that unless climate model output match observations to your standards then they are worth nothing and we should ignore them. To me they're far from perfect but they're better than anything else we have. And as I've said, the observations still match within the statistical standards climate models set

Also as I went back this quote from you caught my eye:

The Japanese had this experience with Mann's models. They gave him a super computer to test his models on and he couldn't do it. It was pathetic. He had to use plug variables to tell the model what the right answer was in advance. And that was the only way it was able to get close to an accurate prediction.

Now I know you're just making shit up. Michael Mann doesn't have a climate model and never did The hockey stick graph is a temperature reconstruction from proxies with some modern thermometer observations tacked on the end. The statistical analyses he runs on temperature proxies can easily be run on a PC. Maybe someone did what you said but it wasn't Michael Mann.

Comment Re:Stop trying to win this politically (Score 1) 786

Unless you've written a climate model yourself I don't think you're qualified to judge the models. I accept the judgement of the people who write the models. You can pontificate on it all you want but until you demonstrate your criteria align with the expectation of the modelers you're just blowing smoke.

Slashdot Top Deals

Things are not as simple as they seems at first. - Edward Thorp

Working...