vttoth — June 30th, 2010
Can both climate alarmists and climate deniers be right (or wrong) at the same time? Perhaps so. At least that’s my understanding after reading about a new study that was designed to evaluate the judgment of climate experts.
The way I see it, yes, there is consensus that the planet is warming. Yes, there is consensus that human activity contributes to the warming. Yes, there is consensus that the warming can have disastrous consequences.
However, there is no consensus regarding the magnitude of future warming. There is no consensus regarding the extent to which human activity vs. natural causes are responsible for the warming. And I don’t think a consensus exist that the consequences of the warming are uniformly bad for humanity, or even that the bad consequences outweigh the potentially good ones.
In any case, consensus is irrelevant. Science is not supposed to be a democracy of scientists, but a tyranny of facts.What makes a scientific theory right is not consensus but logical consistency and good agreement with observation.
Scientists are, however, responsible to communicate not only what they know but also what they don’t understand (this is what defines the line between a climate change advocate and a climate change alarmist, I guess.) Conversely, scientists are supposed to be able to express their doubts without questioning or withholding facts (this, perhaps, is what distinguishes a climate change skeptic from a climate change denier.)
Unfortunately when the debate becomes political, such nuances are often lost or ignored. Politics, especially populist politics, abhors uncertainties and prefers to paint everything in black and white. If uncertainties are mentioned at all, they are merely used as “proof” that the other side is wrong, therefore our side must be right, with no room in the middle. You either believe Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth like the gospel, or you accuse Al Gore of being a fraud artist out to get rich on phony carbon credits.
Categories: Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — May 26th, 2010
This is going to remain a memorable picture for some time to come:
It’s not every May, after all, that we measure 35.8 degrees Centigrade in what is supposedly the world’s second coldest capital city.
Categories: Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — May 15th, 2010
It seems that the German news magazine Spiegel managed to do the impossible: provide an impartial, balanced assessment of the story behind Climategate.
And by “balanced”, I don’t mean balanced in the American journalist’s sense, giving equal weight to both sides, no matter how ludicrous one side happens to be compared to the other, but balanced in the sense of not taking sides, not assuming guilt, and assessing the faults of all the participants regardless of which side they represent.
What I am reading is very discouraging. Climate science should really be called climate politics, with a little bit of science thrown in just to provide fodder for arguments. Meanwhile, both proponents and opponents of climate change sometimes fail to get even the basic physics right; as a minor example, recently I felt compelled to write a short paper about the proper use of the virial theorem in a planetary atmosphere, after reading way too much uninformed discussion by supposed experts online.
Of course way too much is at stake. Trillions of dollars, for starters, and quite possibly the future of our planet. Could it be that this compelled some good people to embellish the truth a little? If that is the case, they did a huge disservice to the very cause that they champion. By compromising the one currency science really has, its objectivity, they increased the likelihood that the public won’t listen to them just when it matters most, should it prove to be the case that real sacrifices are necessary to keep the planet habitable.
That is not to say that taking climate scientists to court is the right answer. If that’s the cure, it’s worse than the disease. Worse yet, it will only ensure more entrenched positions and more secrecy, justifying the hostility towards “deniers”. That is not the way to do science. Informed skepticism should be welcome, but skepticism should be about questioning methods and deductions, not the honesty and integrity of researchers. Will climate science ever be like this? I sure hope so, otherwise we’re all in very deep trouble.
Categories: Physics, Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — May 3rd, 2010
OK, I don’t usually play the geek game and look for nits to pick in television science programs. But…
Today’s gem comes courtesy of the Canadian History Channel and their Aftermath series, the first episode of which I just watched over the Internet. The show had many eyebrow-raising moments (and I don’t mean the implausible concept itself, about the Earth’s rotation slowing down to zero in a mere five years; I could get over that if the science had been right otherwise). This particular gem of a sentence, complete with fancy animation, especially caught my attention:
“The rotation of the Earth creates constant patterns of east-moving winds in the Northern hemisphere, and west-moving winds in the Southern. This is called the Coriolis effect.”
Oh really. I wonder if pilots flying in the Southern hemisphere know this.
Categories: Canada, Television, Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — April 15th, 2010
Just like after 9/11, the airspace of an entire region is closed today, grounding thousands of flights in the UK and Northern Europe.
Unlike on 9/11, this time around the closure is not the result of the panicked, knee-jerk reaction of clueless politicians and officials. It is the result of a volcanic eruption in Iceland:
The plume, clearly visible in this Eumetsat image, is a grave threat to aviation. 28 years ago, volcanic ash almost brought down a British Airways 747 full of passengers, and since then, numerous airliners have been damaged as they flew through similar plumes. Grounding all flights in the affected areas seems like a dramatic, but justified response to a very real threat.
Now the question is this: how long? According to news reports, the eruption shows no signs of abating. Will they keep flights grounded for days, even weeks if necessary?
Categories: Aviation, Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — April 3rd, 2010
I’m back from a week-long trip to Hungary, visiting my Mom, relatives, and friends. Apart from the fact that the second half of my trip was made unnecessarily unpleasant by some cold bug I picked up on the flight from here to there, it was fun. But, it’s good to be home, even though, it seems, I came home in the middle of a heat wave. Yesterday, the heat almost killed me when I was looking for my car at Montreal airport (cars have the nasty habit of moving about when you leave them in large, public lots) while hauling my 60-pound suitcase. Today, it’s going to be even warmer. (No, we’re told, it’s not global warming… it’s the same El Niño weather that brought an unusually cold spring to parts of Europe.) I better check to see if our A/C still works after its winter hibernation.
Categories: Personal, Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — March 13th, 2010
Here’s yet another dramatic prediction by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): that even a small temperature increase can lead to the loss of up to 40% of the Amazonian rain forest.
Except that it won’t. New research shows that there were no significant changes in the Amazon during the 2005 drought compared to previous years (also refuting previous speculation that drought might in fact help the rain forest grow). Like the prediction about Himalayan glaciers, the IPCC’s alarming statement was based solely on a non-peer reviewed report by the WWF (formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, but no longer).
Defenders of the “scientific consensus” argue that small discrepancies notwithstanding, the findings of the IPCC are unassailable, the case for anthropogenic global warming is solid, and that the ones casting the first stone should be those who’d never leave a few innocent mistakes in a giant 1000-page report. If this was all there was to it, I should really keep my mouth shut; I’ve made more than my fair share of embarrassing mistakes in the past in stuff I wrote, and no doubt, I’ll make equally embarrassing mistakes in the future.
But these are not innocent mistakes, not small errors that only nitpickers care about, not even gross errors that can be attributed to carelessness. We’re not talking about a typo here, an omitted reference or erroneous formula there, an improperly drawn conclusion somewhere else. What we have here is the purposeful inclusion of non-peer reviewed material simply for its shock value. And not just in footnotes. This statement about the rain forests leads the section about Latin America, in the IPCC 2007 WG II Summary for Policymakers:
“By mid-century, increases in temperature and associated decreases in soil water are projected to lead to gradual replacement of tropical forest by savanna in eastern Amazonia.”
The body of the text that the summary refers to contains further alarming detail:
“Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000).”
The cited paper by Rowell and Moore is the non-peer reviewed report produced by the WWF, containing some dramatic language such as “the year the world caught fire”. Nonetheless, the authors’ prediction is not near as dire as the IPCC’s version, for which their paper is named as the sole source. Rowell and Moore only say that “up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall.”
Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that the Amazonian rain forest is in serious trouble. You don’t need climate change for this… logging will do the trick nicely.
What I find inexplicable and unjustifiable is the IPCC’s decision not only to include such a striking prediction based solely on a non-peer reviewed source, but even embellish it. The IPCC’s report is supposed to be an objective assessment of the best science available, based upon which trillion dollar decisions will be made, affecting the world economy for generations to come. Instead, at least some sections of it look more like an activist’s pamphlet.
By undermining trust in the integrity of the science, the IPCC may be doing grave harm to the very cause it champions. The scientific evidence may be stronger in the future: the models will improve, and one day, will have real predictive power, the ability to reproduce accurately observed changes in the climate after a certain date using data available up to that date. At that time, we may yet find that the situation is even worse than we thought. Question is, will people still listen if the scientific community discredits itself now by crossing the line between science and activism?
Categories: Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — March 8th, 2010
You can tell that this picture was NOT made in Ottawa today because it’s presently 8 degrees Centigrade here, and the sun is still shining:
No, this video frame is from the French Riviera.
Categories: Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — February 18th, 2010
What a remarkably boring weather forecast:
I wonder if I am allowed to extrapolate from this trend and conclude that the temperature will remain -1 degrees Centigrade, like, forever.
Categories: Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — February 17th, 2010
While it may not feel like it if you live in the US or Western Europe, this has been a very warm January, the fourth warmest on record:
It was certainly warmer than usual (and a lot dryer than usual!) up here in Ottawa. Not that I am complaining.
Some proponents of anthropogenic global warming will point at this result as proof that global warming is “scientific fact”. The plot tells a more nuanced story. In the short term (last 8 years or so) there’s no warming trend at all, if anything there has been slight cooling. Prior to that, there was a roughly 30-year warming period. One other warming period that is very similar in nature occurred in the early half of the 20th century. In between, there was some cooling, just not enough to offset the earlier gains, hence the more recent warming period started with an already higher temperature, and we see an overall warming trend across the 130-year span of this plot.
But is that really a long term trend? Or is it just another periodicity that we simply cannot discern because the data set it too short in duration? This is the question that those “proxy” temperature estimates from tree rings, ice cores and whatnot are supposed to answer. How reliable are those? How representative? That is a key question, which may determine, for instance, if the infamous medieval warm period was comparable to the current warming or not.
Categories: Weather and Climate |
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