7 ms·

Reading the comments is a really depressing exercise. Do people really know the difference between weather and climate?

by Oletros 13y ago

jerf 13y ago
I'm increasingly less impressed by the claim that we can't predict weather across weeks, but we can somehow predict climate across decades. (I've never been overwhelmed by it, but it seems even less sensible over time.) And part of the reason why is that we can't seem to predict climate across years, and I'm really unconvinced we can't predict climate across years but we can predict it across decades. Wrong predictions are wrong predictions; it is irrational to keep excusing wrong predictions over and over again and insisting they'll just get more right in the unknowable future. If the models can't look into the future even a few months and see a high probability of the vortex detaching (and I'm fine with a probabilistic prediction, in fact I'm deeply suspicious of anything else), what use are they for predicting anything else? One wonders if the models are even capable of expressing that prediction (in the machine learning sense of the word "bias").
- jbooth 13y ago
  Predictions aren't magic. They're based on looking at past data and using that to draw conclusions about future data. Weather, being extremely variable even within a day, is a lot harder to predict than, say, "It will be colder in January than in August (in the northern hemisphere)." That one's a slam dunk. Watching the warming trend, it seems more predictable than weekly weather. Even now, with this winder, the north pole is warmer than normal which is part of what's causing the weather systems we're experiencing in North America (as you referenced with the vortex). Why on earth would the models have something like this vortex detaching built into them? We've never seen it before, or seen it so rarely that nobody built it into the model. That doesn't say we can't predict climate, it just says we didn't predict this particular consequence of climate change.
- furyg3 13y ago
  It seems to me that people are misunderstanding looking backwards and looking forwards...
- joshuahedlund 13y ago
  We've gotten much better at predicting weather a few days out[0], because not only has our understanding of the Earth's climate improved by leaps and bounds, but we've also had the chance to iterate thousands of times over the last couple decades to see how well our models perform and adjust them based on that evidence. On the other hand, we've only had the chance to iterate a few times over the last couple decades in predicting longer-term trends several years out, and even though our understanding has increased here as well, we don't have the benefit of very many results to confirm if that understanding is anywhere near enough to predict well over these sorts of time spans. Apparently arctic sea ice has decreased faster than predicted, but average global temperatures are falling out of the "95%" ranges of most of the models of a decade or two ago[1] [0]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/the-weatherman-is-not-a-moron.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/the-weatherman-is... [1]http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2157446...
- flatline 13y ago
  I, too, am a bit skeptical, but this is boiling climate science down into too simple an exercise. We do, for instance, know that things are warming up, and we have many different models to predict what effect that will have on, say, weather trends over a longish period of time. It's kind of like the stock market -- I might think that the fundamentals of company ABC are good, and believe that they will be up over the next five years. Some people do make reasonably good predictions of this sort. Predicting the open and close of ABC's stock tomorrow, however, or the high and low over the next three weeks, is another story, and there's reason to believe that we do no better than random chance at this kind of prediction, in aggregate.
- 7952 13y ago
  It is harder to predict very unusual events. Also, I am not sure what difference it makes? We want to predict climate to inform environmental policy. But a lack of certainty does negate the damage that pollution does.
- rayiner 13y ago
  That predicting behavior at larger scales is easier than predicting it at small scales is a principle you'll encounter repeatedly in the physical science and engineering disciplines. In the physical sciences, models are often top-down, as opposed to in computing where they are almost always bottom-up. In fluid dynamics, for example, the behavior air in a turbulent flow is chaotic at the small scale. Yet, we can still design airplane wings because we have pretty good approximate models for how such flows behave at larger scales. Or to use a physics example: it's easy to predict where a baseball will land, but very complicated to predict where an electron will be in a molecule.
  - scott_s 13y ago
    The analogy I like to think of is a ping-pong ball in the ocean. At any given second, its location will be hard to predict, as at the second-granularity, its location will be dominated by local phenomenon. But, over the course of months and years, we can often accurately predict where it will generally end up in the world due to ocean currents.
- scott_s 13y ago
  There is an enormous difference in localized weather predictions, and whole globe climate predictions. That is, it is possible to predict, say, average temperature across the entire world, while being unable to reasonably predict average temperature in any one place.
- tbrownaw 13y ago
  The idea is that there's a mostly random high frequency medium amplitude component (weather), a somewhat predictable medium frequency high amplitude component (seasons), and a low frequency low amplitude component (climate). So if you observe for long enough, the higher frequency parts mostly average out to zero and you can get an idea of the low frequency component. Even without being able to predict the other components. (See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform )
- garric 13y ago
  See NASA scientist, "the father of climate change," James Hansen's 2009 book entitled Storms of My Grandchildren. He's highly critical of models, though notes that they may be useful in certain specific scenarios. What he focuses more on is the geological record because models can only be as accurate as the information that goes into them. I want to keep this brief, but I also want to quickly note that the cap and trade for greenhouse gases is business as usual for energy producers. Don't believe a word of it; the short story is that it worked poorly in preventing acid rain and won't work for combating climate change. We need a fee and dividend system that doesn't come back to us in tax breaks. I should note that Hansen comes across as very credible and apolitical; I don't trust anyone else when it comes to climate science. His most recent work is available here: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/publications.shtml http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/publications.shtml
fennecfoxen 13y ago
Well maybe if CERTAIN PEOPLE IN THE MEDIA (mostly) and in POLITICS (sometimes) didn't trot out lines to the effect of "Oh, it's summer! and it's hot today! This must be PROOF of global warming!" every summer when it got hot, then we wouldn't get this kind of blowback when it's unexpectedly cold out.
- DanBC 13y ago
  There is a problem in scientific reporting. Scientists want to be honest and truthful. People interviewing scientists don't have much scientific understanding, and don't have time to listen to a full answer. And they'll often then turn to someone else providing an opposing viewpoint for "balance". This new person doesn't care about scientific integrity and they're happy to spew their purely opinion based opinion. (And this is ignoring the people paid to provide FUD who ised to work for the tobacco companies and who know use similar tactics to deny clomate change).
TheCraiggers 13y ago
Considering I still hear "Global warming is fake; this is the coldest winter I can remember" on a near-constant basis, I'd have to say the common layperson knows very little.
- penguindev 13y ago
  I'd trust a layperson as much as a scientist. Which is to say, not at all. Global Warming seems to be a political distraction, driven by some businesses looking to get special favors (carbon trading). Let's just ignore the problems we face now, like pollution and resource depletion, dubious food quality, inhumane factory farming...
  - Oletros 13y ago
    What has to do a climate scientist with "some businesses looking to get special favors (carbon trading)" Are you saying that they are part of a conspiracy?
    - triangleman 13y ago
      No need to be deliberately obtuse--there are many people in industry and government who stand to benefit from carbon trading. There are also many scientists who research climate change. The two groups do not have to be intimately connected for them to benefit from each other. Were all the loan originators at Countrywide part of a conspiracy to sell bad loans, or were they just "following the money"? Why would grant-seeking scientists be immune to the same incentives?
      - Oletros 13y ago
        The OP has said that he doesn't trust scientists. So, is he saying that scientists are part of a conspiracy. And before calling others obtuses, read what the OP has said.
    - penguindev 13y ago
      After spending a good deal of time reading about government funded nutritional 'science' over the last 50 years, in which high-carb hysteria took over (making many of us much less healthy, but making certain large businesses much richer, edit: and making food price inflation appear low), it's quite easy to make a case that research institutions dependent on government grants will absolutely not want to upset the status quo, and junk science is the result. Let's also look at how many economists said "nobody could have seen the debt crisis coming". Clearly, skepticism that would harm the elites is not welcome in respectable academic institutions. Let's say a democratic government does 99% of what rich or connected people want it to do. (Perhaps that's marginally better than a dictatorship) But the government wants to prove 'scientifically' it's doing the right thing. So it funds nutritional scientists and economists (and I will assume climate scientists) that see the 'right things' and give the policies legitimacy. You say conspiracy, but the supreme court would disagree - this is just 'free speech' - corporations are people too! I'm sure you've heard "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
NAFV_P 13y ago
> Do people really know the difference between weather and climate? In the UK, people worry about the climate and moan about the weather.

Reading the comments is a really depressing exercise. Do people really know the difference between weather and climate?

by Oletros 13y ago

Reading the comments is a really depressing exercise. Do people really know the difference between weather and climate?

jerf 13y ago

I'm increasingly less impressed by the claim that we can't predict weather across weeks, but we can somehow predict climate across decades. (I've never been overwhelmed by it, but it seems even less sensible over time.) And part of the reason why is that we can't seem to predict climate across years, and I'm really unconvinced we can't predict climate across years but we can predict it across decades. Wrong predictions are wrong predictions; it is irrational to keep excusing wrong predictions over and over again and insisting they'll just get more right in the unknowable future. If the models can't look into the future even a few months and see a high probability of the vortex detaching (and I'm fine with a probabilistic prediction, in fact I'm deeply suspicious of anything else), what use are they for predicting anything else? One wonders if the models are even capable of expressing that prediction (in the machine learning sense of the word "bias").

jbooth 13y ago
Predictions aren't magic. They're based on looking at past data and using that to draw conclusions about future data. Weather, being extremely variable even within a day, is a lot harder to predict than, say, "It will be colder in January than in August (in the northern hemisphere)." That one's a slam dunk. Watching the warming trend, it seems more predictable than weekly weather. Even now, with this winder, the north pole is warmer than normal which is part of what's causing the weather systems we're experiencing in North America (as you referenced with the vortex). Why on earth would the models have something like this vortex detaching built into them? We've never seen it before, or seen it so rarely that nobody built it into the model. That doesn't say we can't predict climate, it just says we didn't predict this particular consequence of climate change.
furyg3 13y ago
It seems to me that people are misunderstanding looking backwards and looking forwards...
joshuahedlund 13y ago
We've gotten much better at predicting weather a few days out[0], because not only has our understanding of the Earth's climate improved by leaps and bounds, but we've also had the chance to iterate thousands of times over the last couple decades to see how well our models perform and adjust them based on that evidence. On the other hand, we've only had the chance to iterate a few times over the last couple decades in predicting longer-term trends several years out, and even though our understanding has increased here as well, we don't have the benefit of very many results to confirm if that understanding is anywhere near enough to predict well over these sorts of time spans. Apparently arctic sea ice has decreased faster than predicted, but average global temperatures are falling out of the "95%" ranges of most of the models of a decade or two ago[1] [0]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/the-weatherman-is-not-a-moron.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/the-weatherman-is... [1]http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2157446...
flatline 13y ago
I, too, am a bit skeptical, but this is boiling climate science down into too simple an exercise. We do, for instance, know that things are warming up, and we have many different models to predict what effect that will have on, say, weather trends over a longish period of time. It's kind of like the stock market -- I might think that the fundamentals of company ABC are good, and believe that they will be up over the next five years. Some people do make reasonably good predictions of this sort. Predicting the open and close of ABC's stock tomorrow, however, or the high and low over the next three weeks, is another story, and there's reason to believe that we do no better than random chance at this kind of prediction, in aggregate.
7952 13y ago
It is harder to predict very unusual events. Also, I am not sure what difference it makes? We want to predict climate to inform environmental policy. But a lack of certainty does negate the damage that pollution does.
rayiner 13y ago
That predicting behavior at larger scales is easier than predicting it at small scales is a principle you'll encounter repeatedly in the physical science and engineering disciplines. In the physical sciences, models are often top-down, as opposed to in computing where they are almost always bottom-up. In fluid dynamics, for example, the behavior air in a turbulent flow is chaotic at the small scale. Yet, we can still design airplane wings because we have pretty good approximate models for how such flows behave at larger scales. Or to use a physics example: it's easy to predict where a baseball will land, but very complicated to predict where an electron will be in a molecule.
- scott_s 13y ago
  The analogy I like to think of is a ping-pong ball in the ocean. At any given second, its location will be hard to predict, as at the second-granularity, its location will be dominated by local phenomenon. But, over the course of months and years, we can often accurately predict where it will generally end up in the world due to ocean currents.
scott_s 13y ago
There is an enormous difference in localized weather predictions, and whole globe climate predictions. That is, it is possible to predict, say, average temperature across the entire world, while being unable to reasonably predict average temperature in any one place.
tbrownaw 13y ago
The idea is that there's a mostly random high frequency medium amplitude component (weather), a somewhat predictable medium frequency high amplitude component (seasons), and a low frequency low amplitude component (climate). So if you observe for long enough, the higher frequency parts mostly average out to zero and you can get an idea of the low frequency component. Even without being able to predict the other components. (See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform )
garric 13y ago
See NASA scientist, "the father of climate change," James Hansen's 2009 book entitled Storms of My Grandchildren. He's highly critical of models, though notes that they may be useful in certain specific scenarios. What he focuses more on is the geological record because models can only be as accurate as the information that goes into them. I want to keep this brief, but I also want to quickly note that the cap and trade for greenhouse gases is business as usual for energy producers. Don't believe a word of it; the short story is that it worked poorly in preventing acid rain and won't work for combating climate change. We need a fee and dividend system that doesn't come back to us in tax breaks. I should note that Hansen comes across as very credible and apolitical; I don't trust anyone else when it comes to climate science. His most recent work is available here: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/publications.shtml http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/publications.shtml

fennecfoxen 13y ago

Well maybe if CERTAIN PEOPLE IN THE MEDIA (mostly) and in POLITICS (sometimes) didn't trot out lines to the effect of "Oh, it's summer! and it's hot today! This must be PROOF of global warming!" every summer when it got hot, then we wouldn't get this kind of blowback when it's unexpectedly cold out.

DanBC 13y ago
There is a problem in scientific reporting. Scientists want to be honest and truthful. People interviewing scientists don't have much scientific understanding, and don't have time to listen to a full answer. And they'll often then turn to someone else providing an opposing viewpoint for "balance". This new person doesn't care about scientific integrity and they're happy to spew their purely opinion based opinion. (And this is ignoring the people paid to provide FUD who ised to work for the tobacco companies and who know use similar tactics to deny clomate change).

TheCraiggers 13y ago

Considering I still hear "Global warming is fake; this is the coldest winter I can remember" on a near-constant basis, I'd have to say the common layperson knows very little.

penguindev 13y ago
I'd trust a layperson as much as a scientist. Which is to say, not at all. Global Warming seems to be a political distraction, driven by some businesses looking to get special favors (carbon trading). Let's just ignore the problems we face now, like pollution and resource depletion, dubious food quality, inhumane factory farming...
- Oletros 13y ago
  What has to do a climate scientist with "some businesses looking to get special favors (carbon trading)" Are you saying that they are part of a conspiracy?
  - triangleman 13y ago
    No need to be deliberately obtuse--there are many people in industry and government who stand to benefit from carbon trading. There are also many scientists who research climate change. The two groups do not have to be intimately connected for them to benefit from each other. Were all the loan originators at Countrywide part of a conspiracy to sell bad loans, or were they just "following the money"? Why would grant-seeking scientists be immune to the same incentives?
    - Oletros 13y ago
      The OP has said that he doesn't trust scientists. So, is he saying that scientists are part of a conspiracy. And before calling others obtuses, read what the OP has said.
  - penguindev 13y ago
    After spending a good deal of time reading about government funded nutritional 'science' over the last 50 years, in which high-carb hysteria took over (making many of us much less healthy, but making certain large businesses much richer, edit: and making food price inflation appear low), it's quite easy to make a case that research institutions dependent on government grants will absolutely not want to upset the status quo, and junk science is the result. Let's also look at how many economists said "nobody could have seen the debt crisis coming". Clearly, skepticism that would harm the elites is not welcome in respectable academic institutions. Let's say a democratic government does 99% of what rich or connected people want it to do. (Perhaps that's marginally better than a dictatorship) But the government wants to prove 'scientifically' it's doing the right thing. So it funds nutritional scientists and economists (and I will assume climate scientists) that see the 'right things' and give the policies legitimacy. You say conspiracy, but the supreme court would disagree - this is just 'free speech' - corporations are people too! I'm sure you've heard "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

NAFV_P 13y ago

> Do people really know the difference between weather and climate? In the UK, people worry about the climate and moan about the weather.