Crisis for the Climate Models?

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven Hayward

February 6, 2022

One of my heterodox positions on climate change is that many of our scientific efforts to improve our grasp of the earth’s climate system since it became a hot topic (no pun intended) back in the 1970s have actually moved our knowledge backwards. That is, we actually understand it less well than we did 40 years ago.

(Snip)

Few of these difficulties ever make it into mainstream media coverage of climate science—until today. The Wall Street Journal has posted online a long feature that will appear in tomorrow’s print edition entitled * “Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy.” Read the whole thing if you have access to the Journal; if not I’ll cover some key excerpts here.

First, deep in the story is an excellent description of the complexity—and also the defects—of climate models. The main climate models contain over 2 million lines of computer code (much of it apparently still in Fortran). Even after an intensive five-year process to rework the code and acquire better data at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.”

One big problem is the resolution of the models, described thus:

(Snip)

But shut up, the science is settled.

________________________________________________________________________

The New York Ledger

* Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy

____________________________________________________________

Here is the problem in a nut shell IPCC 2003

"The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system's future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions."

 

It seem to me (and I'm not that bright) no matter how big/fast a computer you have, you're still dealing with those 3 words "coupled non-linear chaotic".

[MISBAILEY]

51 minutes ago, Valin said:

3 words "coupled non-linear chaotic".

Translation: garbage in garbage out.

[Valin]

@MISBAILEY

 

If I may

November 15, 2005

 

Transcript

[SDwaters]

3 hours ago, MISBAILEY said:

Translation: garbage in garbage out.

Good point.  Between suppression of data ("hide the decline"), filtering data sources to those biased in favor of a desired result (using sensors mounted to ships hulls over free floating buoys), and other data manipulations, the results of current climate modeling are pretty useless.

 

[Valin]

11 hours ago, MISBAILEY said:

Translation: garbage in garbage out.

 

7 hours ago, SDwaters said:

Good point.  Between suppression of data ("hide the decline"), filtering data sources to those biased in favor of a desired result (using sensors mounted to ships hulls over free floating buoys), and other data manipulations, the results of current climate modeling are pretty useless.

 

 

The problem (it seems to me) is the more data you put it, lets assume the data is as accurate as they can gather, the more Chaotic the Climate System becomes.