Re: OT: Imprecise assessment of the probability of tipping points in the climate system

On May 18, 7:59 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 18 May 2009 10:43:33 -0700 (PDT), bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:

It's insane hubris to think that something like that can be modeled
now. They can't even predict the weather a week in advance.

Climate modelling and weather modelling are two rather different
activities. Weather moels are intended to predict whether it will rain
here, tomorrow.

Clinate models want to predict roughly how much rain will fall on
California through March, April and May, which is more constrained by
thermodynamics than short term local predictions, and correspondingly
easier.

As a longtime resident of northern California, I can assure you that
the annual rainfall surprises everyone, including the people who model
it.

You are arguing that the models are useless in the time frame of days,

Weather models aren't useless in a time frame of days, though they do
lose accuracy after about four days and become utterly useless over a
week or so.

and useless in the time frame of months,

Climate models aren't useless; just not particularly precise. The
seasons are fairly predictable, otherwise agriculture wouldn't be
practical

useless in the time frame of years,

Depending on what you want to predict - once we cottoned onto the El
Nino/La Nina alterantion. prediction got a little better, and other -
similar - alternations are now becoming more obvious.

but undisputedly correct in the time frame of decades.

The models that predict the effect of added extra carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere are less complicated - and much less controversial -
than you seem to think. It's blindingly obvious that if we keep on
burning fossil carbon and releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere at the
current rate or faster, global temperature is going to rise - most
likely about 3.75C over the next century, if we don't clean up our
act.

There's a roughly 5% chance that the warming could be more than 6.4C
or less than 1.1C.

That average 0.4C per decade; the warming will get faster later in the
century. Current warming is closer to 0.2C per decade which is of the
same order as the year to year noise on the global temperature record,
and rather less than the decade to decade noise.

Since we can't predict the noise - yet - as it seems to depend on
wandering ocean currents that are still being investigated in at at
progressively greater depths, you are entirely right that our modles
preidcit better over decades than they do over years.

Horsepucky.

From your ill-informed point of view this may appear to be the case.
In fact, considering the sources that you seem to rely on for your
insight into the science involved, your views are better described as
mis-informed, since you seem to latched onto precisely the kind of
anti-global-warming propaganda that Exxon-Mobil used to fund, and the
coal-mining industry still does seem to fund.

Pointing this out is - unfortunately - insulting, but John's habit of
telling us nonsense about global warming as if he knew what he was
talking about is another kind of insult, potentially rather more
deestructinve to common good.

John characterises me as permanently unemployable - which would be
insulting if it weren't such an obvious expression of pique. At the
moment I seem to be condemned to retirement - at 66 this isn't too
unusual - but I still allow myself the faint hope that I may yet be
able to find myself another job, though the odds don't look too good.

It's not pique. I sincerely want you to get off your butt, quit
obsessing over stuff that's likely nonsense and absolutely beyond
your influence, and do something useful. You are sufficiently
resistant to the concept that I think you never will.

It's pique. You like pontificatiing, and you don't like having it
pointed out that you've been suckered by the anti-global-warming
propaganda industry.

And I'll chuck it in as soon as I find something more useful to do.
Unfortunately, saving the world, or at least civilisation as we know
it has a fairly high utility, so that even if I'm not a particularly
potent contributor to our salvation it's still quite a bit better than
nothing.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
.

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