https://koenvangilst.nl/blog/rising-temperatures
I particularly liked the heatmap with monthly temperature data since the 1900s. It's a lot of scrolling, but you can clearly see that climate is accelerating since the '90s.
I am merging my rainfall data with ENSO data about El Nino and La Nina years to look for patterns in local rainfall during those periods. We are currently in an El Nino and it is predicted to be strong. If it doesn't rain again before the end of the year this will be the second driest year in more than 20 since I began recording rainfall and I am currently >13 inches (>330 mm) under normal for this date. We finished last year in a similar condition, 12.6" (320 mm) under normal. Based on our long-term (10-day) forecast I expect this to be the third or fourth driest year since I began measuring. North Texas, west of Fort Worth.
> I wanted to do rainfall next.
Wind, please!
Most reports like this focus on temperature, some on rainfall.
But more energy in atmosphere -> wind speeds increasing seems logical. And matches my subjective experiences. Would be nice to see this visualized using hard numbers (both extremes & averages).
I do feel like there's less wind here in the Netherlands than before. But maybe that's just my personal experience after moving to a larger city.
So of course "science does not deal in certainties" but most of the questions are really at the second or third decimal point.
There is an excellent video by David Louapre (of Science Etonnante fame) that explains for example how our greenhouse model works. It's in French, but subtitles should do the tricks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewc8FBtEKPs
Since around the 1970s, the North Sea became a few degrees warmer. Fisherman more regularly find fish and other creatures that used to be only down in France or even more south. As far as I know, we don't really know what caused this trend of the gulf stream going more up north. For all we know, it might switch back and we get the climate of Canada; winter from September until April.
Now we find out that same gulf stream is slowing down. We did not predict that and don't really know why it happens and what the consequences will be.
By the way, inside the country, water coming in from more central Europe is coming in faster in winter, causing problems, while in summer not much is coming in, causing more draught. Germany and Belgium are not prepared for this. A few years ago many people died when rivers overflowed.
From what I've read so far, we could get a nordic ice-age, because we're so dependent on that hot water and air.
In what way could this question be asked in bad faith?
As an example: sure, Einstein found in the 1900s that Newton's theory of gravity from the 1600s was wrong, but it's wrong to such a degree that it doesn't matter for everyday applications and we still use and teach Newton's law of universal gravitation because it's a very good approximation with a very simple formula. If we had based the mechanism of climate change on the "faulty" formula and adjusted our emissions based on that, then found out that it's incorrect to the same degree, we'd have been so close to the truth that it would have worked out perfectly (to well within the error margins of global measurements).
The point of science is that it's about testable predictions. You can say "if I drop a mass from 1m height at sea level in a vacuum chamber, it will impact the surface after 0.10204 seconds" and then go and measure that and you can find that it's right to within your measurement's error margins. We've been doing the same for climate mechanisms and a whole host of other things. If the scientific method didn't work, we couldn't have reliable vehicles, let alone airplanes or useful GPS results.
Don't let yourself be mislead by attention-grabbing headlines of "scientists found out they were wrong all along" which we see all too often. Read the article if it's from an otherwise good source, or click through to the source if it's not, and make up your own mind
Though it's a shame to use the climate science example, given the immense anti-science pressure that looks to bury dissenting theories and data instead of engaging them as a means of continuously proving itself in the context of the divisive politics. Which are inevitable given that this particular science seeks to make world altering prescriptions. The failed hope is to make such prescriptions in an environment of no allowable argument. The result is widely percieved corruption of science for political ends. That was never supposed to be an outcome of science, should its principles be followed in spirit and otherwise.
Conclusions have to defend themselves, forever. Ridiculous theories can be marginalized due to lack of evidence, but nothing should be silenced as a matter of working principle. In turn, we can operate based on consensus conclusions but these conclusions have to be able to defend themselves, forever, only on merit.
> [DHMO]:
> - is also known as hydroxyl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
> - contributes to the "greenhouse effect".
> - contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
> - has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
[etc.]
> Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used: as an industrial solvent and coolant [...] [and] as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.
You can convince virtually anyone that water is dangerous and should be outlawed by saying only true things.
> In 2001, a staffer in New Zealand Green Party [...] office responded to a request for support for a campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide by saying she was "absolutely supportive of the campaign to ban this toxic substance". This was criticized in a press release by the National Party, one of whose MPs fell for the very same joke six years later.
More related to this thread, the difference between "just asking questions" and "just sowing doubt" is in the effect on the casual reader rather than in the legitimacy of the question, unfortunately :(. There are things that are harmful to randomly call into question without being specific enough (such that it may sound like you're doubting all of climate change) and/or doing your own research first (many things needn't be carefully asked if you just type it into duckduckgo instead), I believe.
Not saying anyone was sowing doubt here, I'm just responding to your point that there cannot be questions that are off-limits in science. (Also noting that this is a comment thread for the general public on the topic of some graphs, not precisely scientific discourse itself.)
There is insufficient data for backtesting models of that complexity.
Arrhenius's original model have help up pretty well, but it is also simple.
Some models from decades ago including some that were very widely publicised in the 80s/90s have been badly wrong.
Translation: I have never looked for an explanation.
"""Time series of global average temperature anomalies show excellent agreement between observations and model simulations (Figure 1b)."""
Randel, W. J., Polvani, L., Wu, F., Kinnison, D. E., Zou, C.-Z., & Mears, C. (2017). Troposphere-stratosphere temperature trends derived from satellite data compared with ensemble simulations from WACCM. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 122, 9651–9667, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JD027158
Among many, many others in the literature. Climate models going clear back to 1960 have been right on the money, with the primary source of error being predictions about how much stupid shit humans would do.
Are global average temperatures enough to provide data for all the temperature variables in models? Surely only sufficient for a model that predicted only global average temperatures.
Some models may have been right, but some were badly wrong Here is an example of one that got media attntion that is clearly badly wrong.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100212233059/http://www.indepe...
I don't understand this part. Do you mean there is a mismatch between the input parameters to these models and what data you've found to be available?
As for access to journals, yeah, sci-hub is also where I turn to but it's getting less and less reliable. I should make acquaintances with someone at an allowlisted IP address at some point...
> Here is an example of one [model] that got media attention that is clearly badly wrong [URL]
Article is from the year 2000, for context. Parts that have data in them (past or future):
> > in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. [...] Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. [...] within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event" [...] a wide range of research indicates that pests and plant diseases, usually killed back by sharp frosts, are likely to flourish. [...] Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.
Hmm so I'm not seeing the mention of a particular model or study here, just observations of past snowfall and vague mentions (by figures of authority on the matter, to be fair) of "within a few years", "occasionally", and "probably in 20 years". The only real predicted data here is the 0.2°C warming per decade until 2100, but that makes little sense: the day we stop emitting greenhouse gases, the trend will start to slow until it stabilizes (afaik that doesn't take more than one or maybe two decades). It seems foreseeable that we can reduce fossil fuels by at least 50% within that coming century, so how could it keep warming at that rate?
So that seems immediately suspect to me and I wouldn't trust it, but let's say that a casual reader takes it at face value, and for the next handful of decades (until ~today) it should have come true at least. Let's see what actually happened (I'm typing this as I find out, I don't know the answer at the time of writing). The sentence mentions Britain specifically, so that's the right island of the two big ones in the UK afaik, so I searched "britain historic temperatures", found as second result some weather office page (very findable for once! nice), picked a station at random near the middle of the country (at, what seemed to me, an average distance from the coast, to have something potentially representative), and got to this data: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/sta... It breaks down temperatures per month from 1957 through 2022. I copied the data lines into this script:
import sys, re
decs = {} # decades
for line in sys.stdin:
y, m, tmax, tmin, *rest = re.sub(' +', ' ', line.strip()).split(' ')
dec = int(int(y) / 10) * 10 #find decade a year belongs to, e.g. convert "2003" to "2000"
if dec not in decs:
decs[dec] = []
decs[dec].append(float(tmax))
for dec in decs:
# print the decade and the sum of all values divided by how many values are known (i.e., print the average value) to two decimals
print(str(dec) + 's', round(sum(decs[dec]) / len(decs[dec]), 2))
1950s 13.53* incomplete
1960s 12.72
1970s 13.17
1980s 13.15
1990s 13.68
2000s 13.95
2010s 14.04
2020s 14.65* incomplete
Doing the same but with tmin instead of tmax (replace that word in the line that contains 'append'):
1950s 5.17* incomplete
1960s 4.91
1970s 5.0
1980s 4.95
1990s 5.5
2000s 5.85
2010s 5.74
2020s 6.2* incomplete
Neither is precisely correct, but about +0.15°C (looking at both tmax and tmin) also not super far off for a one-decimal-precision figure to begin with and one random weather station (I picked only one, I haven't cherry picked it).
== Conclusion ==
- The temperature prediction I would give a tentative pass (checking more data would further strengthen or weaken that).
- The claim about heavy snow being 'unexpected' 20 years from then (i.e., three years ago), I dunno, traffic is definitely chaos in germany when any amount of snow shows up, but that's not new as far as I know. What constitutes 'heavy snow' anyway? I certainly don't expect heavy snow any given year, and those historic UK figures look lower than what we get today (which makes sense for an island: I'm about as far inland as GB is wide). Hard to say for me whether that came true. What is your take on it?
- The predicted pests and plant diseases did not have a date on it. That may have been a general statement about warming weather. Not sure where I'd find data on pest and plant disease occurrence, especially normalized for use of insecticides or such.
- The only part that I find wrong is the subjective statement `winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"`, based on my experience in Germany. It's certainly not the norm for an average winter's week, but "very rare" also sounds too strong. Then again, GB's historic figures seemed lower so who knows, but I'm out of energy (I'm literally over an hour into this comment, I hope you find it useful at least!) to find further data on snowfall in GB/DE or do a survey of GB's reaction to snowfall.
Conclusion's conclusion: the only thing for which I have data was close enough, the rest was vague to begin with.
What part of the article did you find 'clearly badly wrong'?
aaaaaaand ghosted...
I should really start to err more on the "fuck this" side rather than dilligently verifying posted information and trying to work toward a common understanding
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/what-eviden...
> We know this warming is largely caused by human activities because the key role that carbon dioxide plays in maintaining Earth’s natural greenhouse effect has been understood since the mid-1800s. Unless it is offset by some equally large cooling influence, more atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to warmer surface temperatures. Since 1800, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 parts per million to 410 ppm in 2019. We know from both its rapid increase and its isotopic “fingerprint” that the source of this new carbon dioxide is fossil fuels, and not natural sources like forest fires, volcanoes, or outgassing from the ocean. [...] no other known climate influences have changed enough to account for the observed warming trend
If you're wondering how to establish causality in the first place, when we can't do experiments (we could hardly add and remove a significant amount of emissions at will to see what effect it has), this article provides two methods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7081045/ The problem is not unique to climate science. Quoting the "background" section:
> In clinical medical research, causality is demonstrated by randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Often, however, an RCT cannot be conducted for ethical reasons, and sometimes for practical reasons as well. In such cases, knowledge can be derived from an observational study instead. In this article, we present two methods that have not been widely used in medical research to date.
Beyond global warming, much easier to study is the effect that air pollution has on humans. Stopping coal power plants and combustion engine vehicles in cities would also extend millions of people's healthy years of life every year. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution
> Outdoor air pollution attributable to fossil fuel use alone causes ~3.61 million deaths annually, making it one of the top contributors to human death
The solutions we have today (using wind, water, sun, and fission) that reduce warming and improve health are not perfect, but my understanding is that they are better
I am not disputing that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will net cause warming. I am asking for the methodology used to test climate models. The same with the fact that pollution is bad: nothing to do with the testing of climate models.
The analogy with medicines where controlled trails are not possible is flawed. You can observe large numbers of people. We can only observe one planet.
From the replies and the down votes, its seems people read even asking questions about climate models as a claim that climate change is not happening, or human beings are not a major cause, or something similar.
I do not have specific sources about that myself, perhaps someone else
> is flawed. You can observe large numbers of people. We can only observe one planet.
Good point, I hadn't considered that. Still, one can observe a lot of states over time: Earth with an average global temperature of x°C where the CO2=x, sun_state=y, number_of_penguins=z, etc., then the same set of parameters for another temperature. Check which one turns out to always be followed by a rise in temperature the next month/year/decade. (If the number of penguins turns out to be highly correlated, remember you read it here first! :P yes I'm joking about correlation vs. causation which, based on what you wrote already, I'm sure you know about.)
Whether the methods from the paper I found earlier can work 1:1 with this other approach, I'd have to check (or find what other methods are/were being used in climate science specifically), but that's how this must be done because we indeed have barely any data on other earthlike planets
> its seems people read even asking questions about climate models as a claim that climate change is not happening, or human beings are not a major cause, or something similar.
Yes, I've noticed that as well. There are some downvoted comments of mine (also on reddit) for the same reason. It's a very fine line to walk, making it clear that you're obviously understanding of reality but also wondering about some detail aspect of climate change
When there's some doubt and it could be a legitimate question, I always try to find the time to comment without downvoting because, that way, we keep in conversation and other people might also get more insight, but alas I don't always have time and it's common that I see posts (even on a place like stackoverflow where posts are typically rather objective) downvoted without commenting the reason
From reading the first page, I would say that this could be a summary / an answer to the statement of the person above you:
> when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
(The document seems to assume that you know the earth is an oblate spheroid or something: rather close to spherical, but off enough that it's noticeable under certain circumstances such as spaceflight.)
If that is indeed what you meant to say, I would recommend citing that part and adding the link for reference. That probably helps more people than just posting the document link by itself
Asimov's argument is that modern ideas are 'less wrong' than those of times past. He then goes on to talk about flat Earth and geocentric views of times past, going so far as to literally suggest his critic, refusing to accept any certainty, might believe the Earth could be determined to be a cube next year. That's just deeply disingenuous by Asimov, and I suspect the issue flustered him.
The critic was obviously not suggesting that next year we might decide the Earth is cubical, but referencing modern theories like the luminiferous aether [1]. Asimov would have certainly been aware of such, but as I suspect you might not - it's an extremely interesting tale. The aether was had a tremendous amount of science and support around it. And it was also completely and absolutely wrong. Not incomplete, not even less wrong, just plain wrong. It was only proven to be wrong in the famous (and quite elaborate, by the standard of the times) Michelson-Morley experiment. [2] Yet so strongly supported was the aether, that Michelson actually assumed he made an experimental mistake when he failed to detect the aether. He rejected his own discovery! He has a very famous quote:
---
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
---
That quote was made in 1894, 7 years after proving the aether (and ultimately centuries of established science prior) wrong! He was still under the belief that he simply had yet to achieve the precision necessary to measure the aether! In fact so compelling was it, that it was really finally only put to rest by relativity, which showed the absurd nature of our reality - that the speed of light is a constant from all frames of reference. That only kicked off in 1905. And indeed there's every reason to expect that some, if not much, of what we think today may simply end up being seen as the aether of our times - well supported, logical, wrong.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
He absolutely did no such thing.
What you seem to have missed is that the entire thing is a thought exercise to demonstrate a point.
It reads like a textbook strawman. Asimov's certainty on us 'finally' getting things, more or less, right was challenged. He then strawmans that into somebody claiming there is no such thing as being right, as the future might discover your views flawed. Asimov then procedes to tear down the strawman which he built, with a more than healthy serving of thinly veiled ad hominem and other fallacies enjoined alongside.
I suspect this is why our original poster linked to that 5 page essay instead of paraphrasing what he found so compelling. Argumentative fallacies can give the perception of being right, and even insightful. But in hindsight, it's difficult to say why or how.
> There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.
That’s the sub-headline from your link which is exactly what I said, just with a bit less flourish.