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A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations
- steve_adams_86 3y agoI find this stuff absolutely incredible. I’ve been learning recently about this phenomenon being known, but not understood. The most obvious indication was that logging leads to less rain, so it seems as though trees actually cause rain. One theory was that turbulence in the air above forests could trigger precipitation, and while that might still be a factor, this explanation is very clean and easy to understand. This is awesome in any case. I’ve been wanting to use the “trees cause rain” point in discussions about forestry and hydrology, but had to be careful because we only had correlations as far as I knew. This doesn’t fully solve that, but certainly helps explain and create a causative link. Also just incredible how evolution works. Of course trees cause rain, haha. I wonder if other plants such as grasses in vast plains have their own tricks to seed rain, or if their strategy is surviving drought extremely well. It’s all cool either way.
- xctr94 3y agoI’ve been reading agroforestry and permaculture books for a while — I’d love to get into farming —, and this has been known for ages. Even if not fully understood, it’s well known in agro that trees raise the humidity level of an area and create micro-climates that increase the amount of rain (e.g. of doing nut trees in a valley). I think… modern agriculture just forgot/ignores ancient knowledge.
- philipov 3y agoAre you telling me the Rain Follows The Plow folks were actually on to something?
- mooreds 3y agoSolid joke :) . Unfortunately, you typically don't plant trees with a plow.
- the_third_wave 3y agoActually you do, at least when planting on a large scale. A planting plough is pulled behind a tractor, the device opens a furrow into which seedlings are dropped at a regular interval by someone riding the plough or mechanically. The furrow is closed with the top of the seedling sticking out. Here's how you can convert an old plough to a tree planting plough: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228205053.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228205053.pdf
- brnaftr361 3y agoI bet there's folk tales that parallel it with angry forest spirits, too. Explaining the unknown with anthropomorphization.
- Avshalom 3y agolocal humidity levels is just transpiration, which yeah in a valley trapping the humidity can create rain but that's not the same as this cloud seeding mechanism.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoWithout a doubt, and it’s well known in urban planning and landscaping too. But in a discussion about why industry might be harmful, not having facts to back yourself up makes your case effectively irrelevant. Even pointing to countless reforestation projects with heaps of positive precipitation and hydrological data is no help; as long as the mechanism isn’t clear, people who want to maintain business as usual will not listen. So, information like this is a huge help and a step towards having a more crystallized picture of why forests are crucial to hydrology.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoTerpenes from trees also produce OH which converts methane to CO2. No idea whether this has a big effect, but I find it fascinating.
- aeroman 3y agoThe increase in humidity is actually a different effect - evapotranspiration from trees is included in climate models (along with their response to increasing CO2 concentrations) [0]. The effect in this article is more to do with the particulates that form from the chemical emitted from trees. The article doesn't make it clear, but an increase in tree particulates (known as aerosols) would actually cause less rain. Almost all cloud droplets form on an aerosol particle, so the cloud droplets in a cloud with more aerosols are on average smaller (as the water is spread out over more droplets). These smaller droplets take longer to grow large enough to form rain, an effect which is thought to decrease the amount of precipitation in some regions (although by a small amount). This effect is also included in climate models, but the sources of aerosol (such as from trees) are more uncertain [1], producing the uncertainty in future climate projections. [0] - https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/4/677/2011/gmd-4-677-2011.pdf https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/4/677/2011/gmd-4-677-201... [1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12674 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12674
- Loughla 3y agoModern agriculture didn't forget. It chose differently because quantity is the only measure of success. Trees causing rain has to be substantially less efficient in the short term than irrigation.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoThe trouble is that reduced forest leads to reduced rain, and irrigation often reduces ground water which is replenished even slower than before. It accelerates water losses a lot faster than anyone expected.
- Loughla 3y agoYes, but that is a different problem than immediate water availability for crop use.
- xctr94 3y agoI agree that irrigation needs are urgent. However, we also need incentives towards an eventual transition. A basic example: contours to mitigate how fast water moves in elevated terrain. Cheap and effective. Then water collected at dug basins in the bottom. If you have cheap, constant access to water, you irrigate industrially. It’s only when droughts, lack of groundwater, climate effects, etc. kick in that the alternatives become important. But by then, you didn’t put them in place early enough. So I think farming deserves both short- and long-term thinking. Business as usual won’t work as climate conditions get worse.
- Loughla 3y ago> basic example: contours to mitigate how fast water moves in elevated terrain. Cheap and effective. Then water collected at dug basins in the bottom. Before I respond, I have another question: Are you saying this is something we are not doing and should be?
- lrem 3y agoIt's almost as if farmers were inclined to borrow water from their descendants some centuries down the line, isn't it?
- agumonkey 3y agoIf you have a reading list to suggest, i'm all ears.
- xctr94 3y agoI’ve lots on my e-reader, but I keep going back to Ben Falk. “The Resilient Farm and Homestead” is super cool, you actually follow their story over multiple years, with the farm’s changes rather well documented! Of course the more scientific books on the topic are better information-wise — some used at uni —, but Falk’s is nice to read.
- StewedHarry 3y agoYou should read the extended phenotype by Richard Dawkins if you haven't already
- giraffe_lady 3y agoIt's fun also because this relationship is explicitly & deeply embedded in some north american indigenous ecologies, maybe others. We've been confidently dismissing it for generations.
- meristohm 3y agoTrees are a collection of straws into the ground, sucking up water with negative pressure due to evaporation through the leaves. It's cool that there are cloud-seeding chemicals released as well. Forests smell and feel much better that clear-cut spaces, I know that much. I'd rather the USDA and Forest Service adopt more-sustainable logging practices, for leased land especially (where the economics equation currently favors clear-cutting), like the Menominee in northern Wisconsin.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoi've also wondered how much energy is absorbed by trees, I know on a 100 degree day the coolness of a shady grove well outcompetes the shade of a simple picnic shelter
- Avshalom 3y agothere's a couple things going on there. Photsynthesis isn't absorbing much its ~1-2% efficiency (so mostly just waste heat) but plants are mostly water which has a high heat capacity so it warms slower than a kiln dried wood structure. Wood/bark is also way less reflective than concrete and (living) plants respond to heat by opening up pores and letting water evaporate out of them (basically sweating) which can lower the dry bulb temperature (especially if there's any breeze).
- sampo 3y agoIn infrared, green leaves are more reflective than bare soil or concrete.
- nostromo 3y agoTrees also act as thermal sinks. They transfer surface heat down into their roots, where it is cool underground.
- eep_social 3y agoMore precisely, the temperature underground is very stable. At 8-12 feet there is little to no variation over the course of a year. So in a cold season it will be warmer underground than ambient (this is why foundations are dug “below the frost line”) while the opposite is true during a warm season.
- imjonse 3y agoThey aren't called rainforests for no reason :)
- magneticnorth 3y agoI had always assumed that causality ran the complete other direction! Rain -> happy plants -> big trees draped in ferns and vines and mosses.
- jazzyjackson 3y agotrees basically perform cloud-seeding by releasing micro-droplets of oils into the air "climate: a new story" by charles eisenstein is a great resource on an alternative understanding to climate change then simply "CO2 bad", which he presents as a red herring to ecosystem destruction conventional wisdom is apparently "fair weather leads to more biomass" when the reality might be "more biomass leads to fair weather" as every ecosystem acts as a chemical and energetic buffer
- steve_adams_86 3y agoThis is really interesting to consider, and I hadn’t before. It lends a lot more potential weight and credibility to the idea that rewilding plains (for example), thus increasing the biomass there, would have significant climate benefits. This falls deep into the “We can’t know that” category, but I’m a fairly large proponent of leaving more land alone and letting nature do what it does. At the moment, economic activity like grazing cows seems like it could be a net negative since it’s clearly harming the environment while also preventing natural landscapes from establishing, which could have significant ecological benefits. The idea that biomass can bring stability and better conditions is certainly supported by my aquarium experience, though it’s a closed system. If you limit the number of species, water parameters will swing all over the place. Add more species (particularly plants and micro flora/fauna), and the water becomes clearer and cleaner. Add some small crustaceans, snails, or other animals which love algae and it’ll get even cleaner, and their populations will self-maintain quite well. Add some tiny fish and they will live on the algae, micro fauna, offspring of the shrimp, etc. These systems work well, but they need a huge amount of plants and tiny creatures, bacteria, and small animals to groom and maintain things. Without them, it’ll crash and swing all over until just about everything is dead. If we imagine the world as a giant aquarium where we inhibit the micro flora and micro fauna, bacteria, and other balances, it certainly seems possible that restoring this would improve all kinds of factors like water and air quality.
- runsWphotons 3y agoIf you graze animals the right way you can also increase biomass/help the ecosystem.
- lukas099 3y agoRe: grasses surviving drought, I believe they do this by having extremely deep roots (likely among many other adaptations).
- sorokod 3y agoMatches what Richard Dawkins calls "the extended phenotype" From wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype ): "Dawkins develops this idea by pointing to the effect that a gene may have on an organism's environment through that organism's behaviour."
- mlinhares 3y agoKinda matches the destruction caused by humans beings in the countryside in northeastern Brasil as well. Most of the trees for the somewhat arid climate were felled and droughts that were every 20 years started to become more and more common until now it’s an eternal drought where very little actually grows as it barely rains.
- Beijinger 3y ago[flagged]
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- dclowd9901 3y agoDoesn’t this seem obvious on its face? Any given tree harnesses a tremendous amount of moisture. And it’s constantly “breathing.” Why _wouldn’t_ a preponderance of trees affect ambient moisture (and, by extension, clouds)?
- pvaldes 3y agoGrasses (Poaceae) catch dew easily and move it towards its center. Most plants sometimes release water drops also (see guttation)
- hammock 3y agoWithout exploring the question of why, it makes sense from an evolutionary biology point of view that trees (forests, really, as trees with extensive root systems tend to be pretty drought tolerant) would attract rain. They require it to survive and thrive in the long run
- InSteady 3y ago>but had to be careful because we only had correlations as far as I knew Sooner or later we need to throw caution to the wind when it comes to advocating for behaving more conservatively towards the environment and climate. If we have to wait until we have ironclad proof that we shouldn't be wrecking things, we are A. allowing our caution to be permissive of recklessness, and B. creating a situation similar to the asymmetry of spreading bullshit -- it takes far longer to prove something is harmful than it takes to switch over to some other equally (or more) destructive practice. Sorry, I'll step off my soapbox now. Not even sure if you were discussing these things in the context of conservation. It is indeed really cool stuff! The natural world continues to throw surprise after surprise at us, and the more we learn the more it looks like it really is Fern Gully operating in the wilds of our wonderful earth. Anecdotally, grasses do seem to put off some smell at times, including preceding a heavy rain. To me, they don't seem as as heady and "luscious" like the rich floral terpenes from a forest (then again I'm from the PNW, so I haven't spent as much time in the grasslands). I wonder if it is more soil bacteria that the grasses are in symbiosis with that do the heavy lifting in terms of rain seeding. Neat to wonder about.
- Solvency 3y agoI mean is it cool, or incredibly depressing, because the world will march on with its chainsaws obliterating ancient forests in the pursuit of profits?
- 11235813213455 3y agoand humans mostly do the opposite, air pollution is preventing rain, sometimes it can fall the week-end when pollution is lower For me the "value" of a tree is extremely high, as well as plants, insects, worms.., humans values are the bottom of this scale, just after mosquitoes
- thenobsta 3y agoAre there correlation studies on this? I’m genuinely interested in reading about this.
- finneganscat 3y ago[dead]
- mikewarot 3y agoTangent - Earthworms are an invasive species in North America[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_A...
- kibwen 3y agoSort of. Earthworms are a natural species in North America, but in the northern parts of the continent they were wiped out by glaciers ten to twenty thousand years ago. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/earthworm-native-united-states-more-questions-from-readers-180958094/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/earth...
- goatlover 3y agoThe entire idea of invasive species is kind of fraught, because organisms migrate over time. Barren volcanic islands will become seeded with life. Past extinction events change the ecological dynamic. Technically, ocean life invaded the land hundreds of millions of years ago. Land bridges open up, continents collide or separate, etc. Humans weren't the only organism to migrate out of one continent onto others.
- eachro 3y agoYishan Wong's startup Terra formation(https://www.terraformation.com/ https://www.terraformation.com/) is trying to tackle climate change with this more or less as the underlying thesis.
- galangalalgol 3y agoI love forests, any sort, but reforestation the right way, as Terra seems to support, takes more time than some are saying we have. The wrong way becomes the right way when it is all you have time for. Iron fertilization of oceans is promising for albedo already, if we can efficiently synthesize these terpenes in the right ratio to seed clouds perhaps that would buy some time.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"that would buy some time." Or mess things further up, in a way no one did foresee.
- eachro 3y agoIt's probably fine to have some solutions that operate on different time scales than the other proposed solutions that others are trying.
- czbond 3y ago@galangalalgol can you expand on "if we can efficiently synthesize these terpenes in the right ratio to seed clouds"? It is too early for me to grok, and coffee hasn't kicked in yet
- jonhohle 3y agoMore time than we have for what?
- ako 3y agoThe effects of global warming to have disastrous effects on humans.
- shironandonon_ 3y agoCanada had record wild fires in 2023 and now I’m wondering how this effect will snowball.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoI am too. I think Canadians need to treasure their forests and should be seriously concerned by what’s happening. Our current reforestation efforts aren’t enough, and they’re largely driven to support future logging activity, not restore ecology.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoAnd yet, if we look at the numbers, wildfires are actually nowhere near as bad as they were in the 90's: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/data/charts/NFDB_stats_chart.png https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/data/charts/NFDB_stats_chart.p... I'd like a ban on people going outside and causing wild fires like we had in 2020 though. That was a good year.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoNope - your chart only shows up to 2021. Wildfires are actually much much worse than the 90s. “This year’s fires have now burned more than double the previous record of 7.1 million hectares torched in 1995” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/23/mapping-the-scale-of-canadas-record-wildfires https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/23/mapping-the-scale-o...
- stormbrew 3y ago17.577 million hectares have burned so far this year. If 2023 were on that graph it would be a skyscraper towering over every big fire year in the 80s and 90s. This year is unprecedented. And it isn't even over yet and the fires are still burning.
- standardUser 3y agoBut what does that say about the long term trend? Is 2023 an anomaly skewing the data, or does the data actually show a trend of increasing wildfires?
- nuc1e0n 3y agoWow. I consider myself pretty open minded but the idea that trees are releasing chemicals to seed clouds with is more amazing than I could've envisaged.
- ChatGTP 3y agoSame it’s absolutely beautiful. Makes you realise how amazing the natural world (everything pre-industrial times) is. I’d absolutely love to go back 300 years and smell the forests and dive over pristine reefs. Anyway this has given me more motivation than ever to restart my guerrilla gardening efforts, planting trees in abandoned farmland in my locale.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoBeavers building dams is the amazing natural world. Humans building dams is a sin against the natural world.
- archsurface 3y agoDoes the term "seeding" have two meanings? I understood it to mean dropping particles into clouds to trigger rain. The article uses it to mean using particles to induce cloud formation.
- ffk 3y agoGood question! The term is more generic, introducing something to an existing system to begin a chain reaction.
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- jmyeet 3y agoWhile I believe the link between human activities and global warming have been well-established, I still find the certainty of imminent runaway climate that'll turn the Earth into Venus to be counterproductive. Even if it's true, this message just numbs people. The fact is that to a certain point the Earth has climate balancing mechanisms that we have little to no understanding about. Why do I say this? Because if it didn't, we would already be Venus. The climate on Earth has ranged from ice to the equator to being much warmer than it is even now. So why hasn't this runaway climate change happened in the last 4 billion years? Now for a long time the standard retort has been the pace of climate change is different now. Not so. Look at Dansgaard-Oeschger ("D-O") cycles [1]: > One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C This occurred multiple times over the last 100,000 years. So rather than focus on this doom and gloom scenario, consider that climate change isgoing to kill a lot of people (through famine, flooding, areas becoming uninhabitable and the upheaval from all the resulting migration). Even then, we as a society constantly make tradeoffs of personal convenience where the cost is people dying. Sometimes a lot of people. Even apart from dying, our society cannot exist as it is without the exploitation of the Global South. We as a society have decided we're fine with people people being paid pennies to work themselves to death in death trap factories to make our lives possible. It's not surprising that trees seed clouds. You can kind of see this in photos of a jungle canopy (eg [2]). The new part is learning how sophisticated this mechanism is. But I guess it makes sense: clouds reflect light and so it becomes a defense mechanism for trees drying out. [1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli... [2]: https://www.canopyintheclouds.com/ https://www.canopyintheclouds.com/
- hgghxfbgyvd 3y agoIronic that you can synthesize these hydrocarbons from petroleum. Burn 10,000acres of forest, replace it with chemicals made from a barrel of oil sprayed into the atmosphere.
- sampo 3y agoThis 2004 paper "A new feedback mechanism linking forests, aerosols, and climate" in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics was the first time I read about this. https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/4/557/2004/acp-4-557-2004.pdf https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/4/557/2004/acp-4-557-200...
- chrisdhoover 3y agoI've looked at clouds from both sides now From up and down, and still somehow It's cloud illusions I recall I really don't know clouds at all
- Sniffnoy 3y agoWhy is this an archive link? The original article is still up; indeed, it's from yesterday: https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-messing-with-climate-calculations/ https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-mess...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- naavis 3y agoTo get around the Wired.com paywall. They only let you read a limited number of articles for free.
- SoftTalker 3y agoArchive links stand a better chance of continuing to work over time.
- dang 3y agoWe've changed the URL now from https://web.archive.org/web/20230930090902/https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-messing-with-climate-calculations/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230930090902/https://www.wired.... Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It's fine to post archive links in comments but in general not as top-level submissions. If you've googled around for a current rendition of the article and have satisfied yourself that there really isn't one out there, then it's ok - but otherwise please post the original URL and include an archive link in the thread if you want to.
- paisawalla 3y agoA great HN feature would be a link to a chatgpt chat, with the contents of the article loaded into the context, summary already generated. Some of these articles are five sentences of interesting information, hidden among five paragraphs of forced human interest.
- gmuslera 3y agoMessing with very complex systems and expecting that random odds benefit instead of doom you and all mankind is a bad bet. And this kind of things gives another hint on how complex the system is, how many players influence and are influenced by it, including not even suspected ones. We should take into account things that we don’t know that we don’t know when betting big.
- amelius 3y agoReminds me of this Scandinavian project: https://innovationorigins.com/en/selected/using-wind-turbines-to-create-clouds-to-combat-global-warming/ https://innovationorigins.com/en/selected/using-wind-turbine...
- Loic 3y agoNot a revelation at all. If you read the work of Francis Hallé, it is very well explained. Also the communication between trees through released chemicals during fires. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Hall%C3%A9 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Hall%C3%A9
- carapace 3y agoHere in N. California I've seen it: the coastal forests breath out cloudstuff. When the conditions are right they breath out something that immediately condenses a mist which rises and becomes clouds that drift inland. The trees on each ridge are synchronized so the initial mists are ridge-sized but they grow as they rise. It's cool that this is getting scientific attention, but really weird to me that this was some kind of revelation. It's plain as day if you just watch the forest.
- joelrunyon 3y agoWhy is this not linking directly to the wired article? https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-messing-with-climate-calculations/ https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-mess...
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- dang 3y agoWe've changed it now.
- makeworld 3y ago> so we can fix our climate models. Is there any indication if this discovery will improve or worsen the current outlook? It doesn't seem like the article points in either direction.
- bch 3y agoI believe it was this phenomenon and more discussed in the CBCs The Nature of Things “What Trees Talk About”.[0] Well worth the time to watch. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/what-trees-talk-about https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/what-trees-talk-a...
- WalterBright 3y agoI read an account a few years ago where an orange juice factory in S. America couldn't figure out what to do with the orange peels. Being filthy capitalist swine, they trucked it out to an arid area that was nothing but scrub, and dumped it. Fast forward 20 years. It turned into a garden that created its own micro-climate. All sorts of vegetation, including trees, was thriving in it, and the area it occupied was slowly expanding. It boggles the mind what can be done with the incredible amount of food waste humans generate. Since then, when I eat an orange, I just throw the peels out into the yard.
- ianburrell 3y agoMy city collects food and yard waste. Then sends it to be composted on industrial scale that can handle food scraps. The result is compost that can buy in stores. I think waste composting should be the standard everywhere. It separates organic waste from landfills where it would turn into methane. Composting produces CO2 but most of the carbon gets sequestered in the soil. I do wonder what should do with the compost when there is a huge supply. Mixing it into farmland to improve the soil might be good idea.
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- Modified3019 3y agoIf you’ve ever been among dense conifers trees, you’ll have noticed a mostly blue-ish but ranging from grey to purple haze (like the smoky mountains, or Pacific Northwest). That’s the terpenes (and other VOC, “volatile organic compounds”) that the trees emit. These react with ozone, creating compounds that scatter blue light. I am not certain, but I believe this fog helps plays a role (in combination with specific needle microstructures and density) in the formation of water condensation on conifer needles, which they can absorb, either via drip or more directly when it collects toward the base of the needles. The exact capability will depend on the species. This chemical fog also acts as a communal defense against many pests and pathogens, isolated conifers are more vulnerable without it.
- steanne 3y agothis effect is also the source of the name for the blue ridge mountains.
- bradrn 3y agoAs well as the Blue Mountains, in Australia.
- brutusborn 3y ago"Volatile terpenoids emitted in large quantities by the abundant eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains may cause Mie scattering and thus the blue haze for which the mountains were named." Amazing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Mountains_(New_South_Wales)#cite_note-Bohlmann2008-14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Mountains_(New_South_Wale...
- momirlan 3y agoit is amazing how people think we understand climate, when it's the most complex phenomenon on Earth. We do not comprehend half of it, but pretend to know, and even predict climate. A 5 day weather prediction is a total different beast than climate prediction, and even that is proven wrong sometimes.
- breakyerself 3y agoI mean the planet is as warm as it was predicted to be 50 years ago based on the emissions scenario that played out. Considering the earth is hotter than it's been in 100,000 years I would say that's one of the greatest predictions in the history of earth sciences.
- momirlan 3y agoyou have a link to that prediction ?
- breakyerself 3y agohttps://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-forecast-that-still-holds-up https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-foreca...
- momirlan 3y agogiven the rate of publishing climate models, each predicting a certain temperature, one will eventually hit the right point. it's as inevitable as carpet bombing, and it doesn't prove anything.
- breakyerself 3y agoNailing the correct amount of warming is the norm for climate scientists not the exception. It's the contrarians who continually make bad predictions. https://youtu.be/tPSIvu0gQ90 https://youtu.be/tPSIvu0gQ90
- jongjong 3y agoI've been saying over and over that there is a lot of stuff that we don't understand and don't account for in climate models but it keeps getting downvoted. There are too many complex variables and interdependencies to be able to model climate accurately. Anyone who has built any simple simulation knows how incredibly fragile they are. The tiniest mistake or omission can throw everything off even when there aren't many variables. The more variables, the stronger the effect (not weaker as some people would assume, the errors are magnified by interdependencies, not diluted in the sheer number of other correct variables). Simulations are extremely vulnerable to the butterfly effect.
- ethbr1 3y agoI'd guess there's a thin line between "There is a lot of stuff that we don't understand and don't account for in climate models" vs "There is a lot of stuff that we don't understand and don't account for in climate models... and so climate models should be ignored" HN voting isn't always good at parsing nuance. It's an interesting area I'm unfamiliar with. How are uncertainty bounds communicated in complex, compounding simulation models?
- brutusborn 3y agoFor simpler models you can do a sensitivity analysis by rerunning the model while systematically varying the uncertain parameters. Based on reading a handful of IPCC papers, a similar method is used in climate science for the most important parameters, but is severely limited by the resources needed to rerun the models and the sheer number of parameters. Basically, any uncertainty due to complexity is mostly ignored and any skeptics who point this out are tarred as "deniers." Combine this with the fact that generally climate scientists do not produce any point predictions to verify models, and I think you can safely ignore many climate models. The papers that do produce explicit measurable predictions tend to find an interesting result by stretching the models to fit a narrative, eg: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0263-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0263-1
- nvm0n2 3y agoHow are uncertainty bounds communicated in complex, compounding simulation models? Poorly to not at all. Climate models have been diverging over time. As details are added (e.g. to try and handle clouds) the different teams making models get different results, and the gap between those results has been widening. We are told the science is certain but the reality is the science has got less certain. Journalists don't like to cover this because they see themselves as change agents, and discussing the actual levels of uncertainty would discourage change. This article in WIRED is an interesting exception, maybe it means something. The gap between models is compounded by another problem. The individual models are often very buggy and suffer severe numerical instability. Even when told to assume no CO2 emissions at all, for which they are programmed to assume a steady state, they often end up predicting a massive ice age or that Earth becomes as hot as Venus. These runs are simply discarded and the issues are covered up. Because these problems would cause ultra-wide CIs, climatologists prefer to just take an average and then present the predictions without accompanying measures of uncertainty. They also do this with the input data, for which there is also wide uncertainty. They have little choice in the matter. Climatologists know their models aren't much good. Last year some of the most famous climatologists wrote an article in Nature warning scientists that there was a "hot model" problem, i.e. models were over-predicting actual warming, the very problem skeptics had been talking about for decades. It's paywalled but there's a copy here: https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-soft-criticism-from-the-mainstream/ https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-... We are climate modellers and analysts who develop, distribute and use these projections. We know scientists must treat them with great care. Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’2 and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence3–7. Some suggest that doubling atmospheric CO2 concentrations from pre-industrial levels will result in warming above 5 °C, for example. This was not the case in previous generations of simpler models. Not much of this reaches the mainstream.
- gofixurcode 3y agohttps://archive.ph/1Qnjp https://archive.ph/1Qnjp
- nico 3y agoAbout 10 years ago I went to the Amazon rainforest to a place where you could climb trees. The host there explained to us that trees made it rain by “sending fairies” up into the clouds - then when he saw our faces he said the fairies were, of course, just chemicals released by the trees Really fascinating to see a recent article about the scientific research of this phenomenon
- lost_tourist 3y agoSo aside from how this affects cloud formation models, could it be used directly to seed clouds if it could be made in large quantities artificially? Probably a dumb question, but I'm not really a meteorologist or atmospheric physicist...
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