Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Are Climate Prediction Models Too 'Conservative'?


NeitherPoliticalNorPolemical
PolarWarmingVille


The following is from a commentary by Gavin Schmidt the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies published last week in Nature:

"...For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened..."


Of course, in answer to my question at the top of the post, the problem with the climate prediction models is not an ideological one.

Instead, it's an issue of missing data.

Missing data that we've got to find, and fast, as Dr. Schmidt explains:

"...Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly."


Imagine that!

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Of course, funding institutions, scientists and projects to collect such data is most definitely a political act and, unfortunately, increasingly viewed by some, quite wrongly in my opinion, as ideological.
Image at the top of the post - originally from the NASA page tracking polar ice sheet loss.


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3 comments:

Evil Eye said...

As governments squander money to win elections or enrich their base, the world drifts further into a climate crisis.

The Carbon Tax is a mere placebo with government pretending to do something, when they are not.

We have lost, before the game has begun.

e.a.f. said...

watched a documentary on PBS recently which dealt with carbon to day and yesterday, well a whole lot of yesterdays. they drilled for ice cores at both poles and the cores went back to prehistoric times, hundreds of thousands of years, I think at one point they mentioned millions of years. The documentary also focused on ginko leaf fossils. The plant has been around for 250K years, and the fossils show how much carbon was in the air. Carbon has fluxuated with or without humans, but humans now are adding to the problem.
My take on carbon is, we don't see it, we don't deal with it. In the documentary the scientist was in a 70s convertible with an old tail .pipe from which not gas was emitted but rather, "carbon turds". looked like hockey pucks. As he drove, out fell the "carbon turds" and you got an idea of how muchh carbon the car emitted. Then he used a diagram to explain how much carbon is emitted in one day for a billion vehicles. Yes, the piles of "carbon turds" in creased. It looked like the whole earth would be covered in them. Gave me a whole new prespective on carbon, I could see it. Never having been fond of the carbon tax, I now clearly see how much carbon we emitted, that it can't continue and a tax is about the best way to go about it. Anything further would involve governments restricted how often planes fly, how often you drive, eliminate most cruise ships, etc. might clean up the air

Lew said...

Late for work? You’ll soon be able to blame it on climate change.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68684244#