There’s not much I can say about this quote from the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach as it stands on its own quite well.
The context of this quote is article on the bust of a forecast that was to be “snowquester”. You can cut the disappointment in the air with a steak knife. Achenbach muses:
Still, I blame the storm more than I blame the computer models. The models are pretty good. It’s Nature that messed this up.
I hope he escapes from his alternate reality soon, people must be looking for him.
Full story here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog/wp/2013/03/07/forecasts-and-probabilities/
h/t to Willis E.
UPDATE: Some people think he was being sarcastic or humorous. For example, from this part:
“I thought the forecast for Snowquester was pretty good, as total busts and epic fiascos go.” is clear as day, but I’ll translate for you: The forecasters gave it a good shot, but it wasn’t good enough. It was a total bust.
But there is also this:
The models in this case predicted serious snow in the I-95 corridor, but the storm “underperformed,” and didn’t drop snow intensely enough and consistently enough to cool down the warm layer of the atmosphere and the warm ground in the urban areas.
The storm “underperformed”.
I read the entire essay, but I didn’t get the sense that he was joking. I considered the possibility he might be before I wrote this post. The clincher for me was this update:
Update 2: I’m told via Twitter that my chaos line is incorrect. Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) writes: “Chaos in weather systems is technically deterministic – it happens even without introducing random elements.”
If this was a humor piece, somehow I don’t think he’s be worrying about details like that.
YMMV – Anthony
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One more from civil engineering. “The bridge modeling designs were pretty good, it is gravity that overperformed and caused the bridge to collapse.”
I bet you are all happy that there is not an IPCC for civil engineering to use their modeling to design our buldings, bridges, streets, etc.
Al told me to tell you.
Every time you doubt a Computer Model real people and real Insects die. Or something
http://clmtr.lite/cb/puO0J5
Jeez – I’m rubbish at message cut ‘n’ paste. Al bots will probably close my account now. Bye to all you deniers or something.
http://clmtr.lite/cb/puO0J5
I am pretty sure . . . ? . . . . that is why weather forcasting people are short term extrapolators . . . and if they have a good record . . . “masterextrapolators”! At least, that is my hypothosis.
If it was my job to define the term “anti-science” it would feature strongly the concept that inconvenient empirical data is be discarded when it conflicts with preconcieved ideas.
I would have to elaborate to distinguish this from both “theology” and “delusion” – or maybe not.
@Scott:
‘snowjob’ Just after I had stopped laughing at the article and some of the comments , You DID have to put that in now I’m hurting!
“Chaos in weather systems is technically deterministic – it happens even without introducing random elements.”
This is a demonstration of really mixing things up. There are two ways of calculating some outcome with multiple predictors – deterministic and probabilistic/stochastic/random. These refer to different ways to model actual phenomena – Nature herself does not have some features that are deterministic and some that are chaotic/random.
I am not the best at explaining the stochastic/deterministic difference – maybe [some] one else here can show how this quote truly looks like someone trying to impress with big words.
The Storm did not “underperform”. It performed as promised – just farther south. They missed the track, nothing more. We got 2.5 inches of melted precipitation 90 miles south of DC, but since it was too warm to be all snow, we only got a few inches of the frozen stuff, and a lot of the regular wet stuff.
The models blew the track. Why? Because it was not a standard track (the models are based upon past performance and statistical probabilities mostly). Maybe the next time a storm behaves this way, it will be factored into the models and they will be more accurate – they gain accuracy with experience.
But the storm did what it was predicted to do, just not in the place it was predicted to do it in.
Boy, if you have that much faith in the models, you don’ know much about forecasting. Ask anyone who forecasts & watches the models. If you don’t put the human touch of interpretation to your forecasts (considering all the data, not just the models), you are doomed to fail.
…. and of course the same is true for longer term / climate models.
Speaking of forecasts, looks like we will be having a good snow storm here in the Colorado front range tomorrow. MY forecast is for 5-10″ in Denver, 8-14″ west suburbs & 15-25″ in the foothills. Time to go play in the snow!
Since there seems to be differing opinions on whether the author was serious or not, someone ought to contact him – I am guessing his email is available via the WaPo. Maybe he would respond for our benefit?
7:20 here, Saturday morning. A late start, a cup of coffee, I fire up the machine and plug into WUWT and scroll down to where I left off yesterday – and this is what I see first up. I laughed so hard I scared the cat. Wonderful start to the day, thank you, Anthony. That quote is going on my wall. 🙂
FerdinandAkin says:
March 8, 2013 at 5:14 am
“That’s right, it was the wrong kind of snow.”
LOL. It was “rotten” snow.
But, seriously folks, Achenbach is sort of a cross between Dave Barry and a serious news columnist. He is known for his dry wit and sense of humor. But, I sense here perhaps a slight homage to Douglas Adams.
Robert Hooke had a few things to say about the shortcomings of our attempts to model nature through thoughts or arts:
The truth is, the Science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the Brain and the Fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of Observations on material and obvious things.
******************************************************
There are but few Artificial things that are worth observing with a
Microscope, and therefore I shall speak but briefly concerning them. For
the Productions of art are such rude mis-shapen things, that when view’d
with a Microscope, is little else observable, but their deformity…
…whereas in natural forms there are some so small,
and so curious, and their design’d business so far remov’d beyond the reach
of our sight, that the more we magnify the object, the more excellencies
and mysteries do appear; And the more we discover the imperfections of our
senses; and the Omnipotency and Infinite perfections of the great Creatour.
–Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)
They did not factor in the global warming, which melted the snow… “it’s worse than we thought”
thelastdemocrat says:
March 8, 2013 at 11:18 am
No; Gavin Schmidt uses exactly the correct words.
Chaos emerges through iterative amplification of low-order bits in the state of a system (if we express the state as a vector of digital words). Think of the famous wings of a butterfly metaphor. Basically any feedback loop with a gain higher than 1 will accomplish that over time. Of course, in nature at certain amplitudes “different things” happen; see for instance Willis Eschenbach’s Thunderstorm Thermostat hypothesis (where, given enough moisture, at a certain temperature threshold cumulunimbus clouds emerge and rapid convection changes the flow of heat in the system). So infinite amplification is not possible, but anyway, the amplification process is what leads to “wild swings” from initial unmeasurably small perturbations. Without any random influence.
Obviously the resolution of the digital model plays a role here – Nature usually has a finer resolution than our digital models, and if you want information from lower state bits to be left-shifted over time into higher state bits you gotta have those lower state bits in the first place. What’s the Planck length; 10^-38 m ? So that gives you a rough idea of how fine you could represent spatial coordinates…
Anthony, I cannot recall reading about Achenbach’s writings and I don’t know him from Adam and could not care less. But when I read:
I’m tempted to bold the two sentences, but I think the last sentence says it all. On the other hand he may be very serious in which case we sceptics have a very, very long way to go. I hope not. I sincerely hope for all our sakes I am right here.
Sad-But-True-Its-You says:, in part on March 7, 2013 at 11:00 pm:
“Just another example of, the “Arctic ocean will be ice free by summer 2010″”.
I checked Google for that phrase since I remember recently hearing in
WUWT this being said about 2012. Google could find me only one example
of this phrase using 2010, and it was said in the above S-B-T-I-Y comment.
For 2012, the only example I found with Google was a comment in a June
2012 WUWT article.
The storm did not completely defy forecasts in Philadelphia. At least some
weather forecasting servives in Philadelphia were saying 4 or 2-4 inches for
Philadelphia, but with a chance of little snow at all, from days before the
storm to hours before the snow was supposed to start.
All along until the eve of the storm, the Channel 6 news said that the
models were not in agreement.
I agree with Achenbach. In nearly every disaster in my life, I have seen that it was reality that was at fault.
posted on March 2nd, linked to the same daily maps that have been on line for six years;
http://www.aerology.com/Home/Index?location=NorthAmerica&mapType=Snwd&date=3/7/2013
current status of site upgrade, new temperature color scale maps processed up to 1-31-2013;
http://research.aerology.com/natural-processes/temperature-scale-update-on-maps/
These maps are based on the past four cycles of the lunar declinational pattern repeats on a 6558 day long period, I think for a six year lead time they did almost as well as the 5 to 7 day models did. This is the determinist chaos that Gavin hints at but he calls it random, I do not think it is random, and 28 years ago I set out to find these patterns for myself.
Weather models; ecm, gem,nam, jma, gfs are pretty good and getting better. But they all fail to predict the weather exactly. Nature is always messing up the models. Figuratively, sarcasm fails as humor when it isn’t recognized as sarcasm. When everybody is left wondering, “Is he being sarcastic?” Failure mode. It was neither will written nor well thought out.
Yeah well, I reside smack in the middle of South-Western Ontario, just about equidistant from Lake Ontario and Lake Huron with Lake Erie a bit closer. The “Land Between the Lakes”…a Maritime environment slap in the middle of a large continent. A Chaotic situation with many many variables…Weather Forecasts seem more entertainment than prediction…..mostly dramatic, frequent changes…..and the odd massive surprise especially in winter………
..massive storms that suddenly appear out of nowhere and farces like “Snow-quester”….one a few years back embarrassed the Greater Toronto mayor who in anticipation called for federal assistance…the army….to help clean up a….flurry….