Love him or hate him, it is worthwhile to understand where he is coming from, so I present this video: The emergent patterns of climate change
According to TED:
You can’t understand climate change in pieces, says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt. It’s the whole, or it’s nothing. In this illuminating talk, he explains how he studies the big picture of climate change with mesmerizing models that illustrate the endlessly complex interactions of small-scale environmental events.
Video follows, comments welcome.
The transcript is here: http://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_schmidt_the_emergent_patterns_of_climate_change/transcript
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Cal65 says:
May 3, 2014 at 12:47 pm
FORTRAN; riiiiggghhhhttttttt…
Maybe, but the output adjusts to Java 🙂
May 3, 2014 at 5:06 pm |TimTheToolMan says:
Must be highly localised, Tim. Invariably i do better by sticking my head out of the window to check the cloud formation and the barometer … sometimes even watching what the ants are doing. But then, I’m an old yachtie. Have noticed over time that the BoM forecasts for Brisbane (Aust.) mostly run a degree-C or so hot.
Damnit! Made another syntax error … mods, would appreciate a fix-up, please … needs a ‘/’ before the block quote end.
We have dozens of models with different assumptions about the climate producing widely divergent results. Why can’t we just concentrate our efforts on having one good model? Climate science apparently can’t or certainly won’t express an opinion about the relative level of ‘skill’ among the many competing models.
The predictions (or substitute a weasel word) for global temperatures range from historical recovery rates from the Little Ice Age to something like three times that amount. The spread has not narrowed in twenty years and forecasts to date have failed.
But the science is settled and we are oh so gosh darn 95% certain that we have it right!
… Professor Lennart Bengtsson.
Professor Lennart Bengtsson has a long and distinguished international career in meteorology and climate research. He participated actively in the development of ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting) where he was Head of Research 1975-1981 and Director 1982-1990. In 1991-2000 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. Since 2000 he has been professor at the University of Reading and from 2008 the Director of the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland.
Professor Bengtsson has received many awards including the German Environmental Reward, The Descartes Price by the EU and the IMI price from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). He is member of many academies and societies and is honorary member of the American Meteorological Society, the Royal Meteorological Society and European Geophysical Union. His research work covers some 225 publications in the field of meteorology and climatology. In recent years he has been involved with climate and energy policy issues at the Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Source: The Global Warming Policy Foundation
John West asks “who still uses FORTRAN”. I do! I have also taken classes and/or programed in machine language, Assembler, BASIC, Pascal, Balgol, Ada, C, C++, C#, HTML, and Postscript. What language I use depends on the task at hand. FORTRAN is my favorite programming language. I can program FORTRAN in my sleep. At times I use shell scripts, but the rest have mostly fallen by the wayside. BTW my last job that involved programming ended in 1999.
David in Michigan says:
May 3, 2014 at 7:20 pm
I repeat, I’d like to hear more about these models.
—————————————————————————————-
I’d like to hear more about the assumptions wouldn’t you?
The main assumption that human CO2 is the main driver of temperature increase has not been convincing over the last 17 years and 9 months or responsible for those temp increases before the industrial revolution.
Stephen Mosher says:
‘One, a skeptic, said the climate is unknowable. My best prediction is the temperature will be unchanged.
In 1938? Temperatures were still rising.There were no skeptics because nobody was saying it was CO2. Ask the same question in 1970 and Kenneth Watt proclaims at the first Earth Day:
“At the present rate of nitrogen build-up, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
I can actually remember the day and being rather skeptical of this claim. The physics was well enough known then that Kenneth should have know better. But there are some rather small NO absorption bands and there is always the possibility that some strange property will emerge.
If the 1938 question had been, “How warm will it be in 1970?”, the climate scientist’s answer would have been wrong, as wrong as Kenneth Watt.
Seems they can’t model the ice either …
Spiegel On Antaractic Sea Ice: “Never Before Has There Been So Much Ice At This Time Of Year Since Measurements Began”!
http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.ApZkfIIU.dpuf
Having way too much fun with this.
So at the last glacial maximum a Homo habilis and a climate scientist are discussing the future and the climate scientist opines that if we don’t stop burning so many campfires the temperature will be 5 degrees warmer in 2014. Does the climate scientist show skill?
“You can’t understand climate change in pieces, says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt. It’s the whole, or it’s nothing.”
I guess it’s nothing then, because you can’t understand how any system works until you understand how the pieces work individually and how they interact with each other, and Climate Science doesn’t have all the pieces yet.
Some of this lecture was cleverly constructed. The variables that dictate weather, and climate for example pollution was thrown in. Well pollution poisons the air we breathe admittedly, and when the sun is cut off via clouds or dust, yes it does cool the climate, it doesn’t heat it up. He didn’t mention jet streams, but he did mention orbit. And cutting down large areas of rain forest, has proven that the transpiration from these areas do change the height of clouds in and around the region, so precipitation patterns move. Volcanoes yes can alter and cool the planet for a while.
China’s pollution, yes from coal surface burning fires. But CO2 increases decrease when the planet cools as plants go dormant in winter. But he was right when he said there are many variables that effect the climate and one is not human kind as the main forcer, but we create pollution for sure. He forgets to mention that rain usually clears dust and pollution from our cities, temporarily. Cleverly constructed argument on the side of AGW.
Where did Mosh go to?
I like the rule which Forbes used to have for evaluating mutual funds. Grade them for performance in the up part of the cycle AND in the down part of the cycle, at least 2 of each if possible. It’s too easy to get stuck in one direction or the other.
Attempting to model anything where the physics in largely unknown, is a joke. All you have is curve fitting. Such ‘models’ have zero predictive power.
Even modelling simple systems such as fluid flow in a pipe is very difficult: “The Navier–Stokes equations are also of great interest in a purely mathematical sense. Somewhat surprisingly, given their wide range of practical uses, it has not yet been proven that in three dimensions solutions always exist (existence), or that if they do exist, then they do not contain any singularity. “
henry says
The climate is changing only because of natural reasons.
It is God who made it so.
jeffalberts says
Actually THERE’S the #1 stupid skeptic argument.
henry says
5 years ago I was definitely an Al Gore man, thinking the (climate) science was settled.
Then I ended up one day here at WUWT, reading this. I remember printing it out.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
From then onward I became a skeptic.Maybe take some time and read that post? It shows that there is natural variability over time..
My own subsequent investigations confirmed that we are not globally warming anymore. We are globally cooling naturally, and it will last for at least another 30 years or so.
This is somewhat worrying (to me), as (I think) it may cause famine in the future.
There is however some AGW, noted by me, but it is due to man wanting more trees and more lawns and more crops. This traps some heat. We donot know exactly how much. I doubt if it is a lot, as my figures from 1974 or so shows, But, in the final analysis, that again is due to life itself, and that is nature, and that is natural.
If you believe in God, you would assign natural variability as part of His intelligent design.
If you don’t, that you would assign the change in weather as due to nature or due to natural reasons.
Either way, whatever your personal beliefs, natural variability, i.e. variability due to nature (or divine design), is the #1 clever skeptic argument. Natural variability is the null hypothesis. Everything else is H1.
Blessings,
Henry
Anthony Watts
I predict that there will be blocking also polar vortex over the South America due to strong ionization.
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/images/fig2.pdf
John Christy should give a TED talk:
“For example, I analyzed the tropical atmospheric temperature change in 102 of the latest climate-model simulations covering the past 35 years. The temperature of this region is a key target variable because it is tied directly to the response to extra greenhouse gases in models. If greenhouse gases are warming the Earth, this is the first place to look.
All 102 model runs overshot the actual temperature change on average by a factor of three. Not only does this tell us we don’t have a good grasp on the way climate varies, but the fact that all simulations overcooked the atmosphere means there is probably a warm bias built into the basic theory — the same theory we’ve been told is “settled science.”’
Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2014/03/20/4093680/john-r-christy-climate-science.html#storylink=cpy
Tom Trevor says:
May 3, 2014 at 9:51 pm
Where did Mosh go to?
——-
It is difficult to type when one is using both hands to pull foot out of mouth.
Streetcred writes “Have noticed over time that the BoM forecasts for Brisbane (Aust.) mostly run a degree-C or so hot.”
Perhaps we have different expectations. If they predict 15C and its 14C a few days in advance then that’s pretty good going IMO. But its actually the “features” of the weather I think they do well with. If they say showers in the afternoon in a couple of days and there ARE showers in the afternoon then that’s a good prediction in my book. Of course I’m in Tassie where weather varies considerably. We can get all 4 seasons in an afternoon so the fact they can see them coming is impressive IMO.
Mosher writes “Skill is not measured that way.”
Lets just say you have a “method” that predicts whether it will rain on any given afternoon. Suppose the naive guess is “the same as yesterday afternoon” and say the naive guess works 25% of the time. And lets suppose the skilful “method” works 26% of the time.
So the method is skilful, but is it useful? Well you might on average pick a rainy afternoon once a year better than the naive guess. I dont think I’d be planning my BBQs on that kind of information.
“Skilful” does not imply Useful.
When I want to go looking at pretty images, I can open a modern gaming program that shows some skill.
When I want to get into global warming science, I’m still looking, after nearly a decade, for THE definitive paper that gives a quantified, high confidence, replicated relationship between the temperature of the lower air and the concentration of CO2 in it.
Having some ‘expert’ state baldly that it is known and solid is not science. Proof, please, Gavin, give us the seminal paper that works, or just be quiet
I wonder about Gavin’s thoughts about the leaked UAE programmer’s notes, Harry Read_Me Very funny and also very sad. Even to a non-programmer such as myself, it seemed apparent no one except the programmer cared a whit about the model or the data itself, much of which was incompatible to the model. The outcome was pre-ordained.
Was that an example of Gavin’s skilled model?
And I wonder what has happened since? Has anyone untangled the code, found and reconciled all the data? ….Lady in Red
I dunno, did he seem like a nasty guy, almost sneering as he talked (perhaps at anybody who’d disagree), while he went on to talk and talk, without ever actually explaining anything?
It is fascinating that the author of the quoted introduction selected “mesmerizing” to describe the TED talk, by the way:
“mes·mer·ize (mĕz′mə-rīz′, mĕs′-)
tr.v. mes·mer·ized, mes·mer·iz·ing, mes·mer·iz·es
1. To spellbind; enthrall: “He could mesmerize an audience by the sheer force of his presence” (Justin Kaplan).
2. To hypnotize.”
Mesmerize has little to do with facts and much to do with illusion, sucking ’em in, magical performance and hypnotic suggestion.
Dr. Schmidt’s strategy seems to be a sophisticated version of the same one used by the tailor in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.
We must be mesmerized by the many fine details of his amazing models to finally see the whole magnificent vision he is selling us.