High resolution global climate mapping | Hacker News Reader

High resolution global climate mapping

nasa.gov

22 pointspzaich14 comments

Did the models predicting this one get the past 20 years right? With how many free parameters? Tuned after the data collection or before?

As a scientist, the recent failure of nearly all "predictive" climate change models puts into question the methods used to generate these models.

2090s?

How reliable it is to predict with extrapolations on such a scale for nearly a century?

Skipping over the fact that they've ignored the last 8 years of cooling and only taken up to 2005, this data is: A "bias-corrected" data set based data simulated from some models, where the bias-correction algorithm is the result of a study which uses a model-derived data set as it's input, where this model-derived data set is itself derived from another model-derived data set, which is calibrated against "psuedo-observations", and I haven't even bothered to look what model they based that on.

I'd say it's about as reliable as a Microsoft operating system.

This does not make any sense. They compare real data with made up data 80 years in the future.

Why they did not show 1950<->2012 comparison?

Not as global as I had expected.

Title: NASA Supercomputer Generates Closer Look at Future Climate Conditions in U.S.

Is it just me, or could the people in a majority of these places (except very south) actually prefer the global warming situation to the current one? The projected map seems rather acceptable.

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/whats-wrong-wi... "Rapid change is the real danger. Human habits and infrastructure are suited to particular weather patterns and sea levels, as are ecosystems and animal behaviors. The rate at which the global temperature is rising today is very likely unique in the history of our species. "

By area, you might be right, but the big population centers of the US take a big hit. The impact to California + Texas + Floria is going to be pretty gigantic.

And ask people living somewhere that is stereotypically "cold" like Chicago if they want even hotter summers. They will say no.

Some of the crops would shift to more northerly latitudes, although Canada is a major crop producer currently. Some of the southern climes would need larger water supplies for crops that would benefit from the new temperature. Low-cost desalination plants would probably be a must[1].

1) In California and Georgia, given their farmland and competing urban needs, desalination is going to be a necessity even without any climate change.

Except that the US is not the world </snark>

The particular map is about USA only, but in any case I can imagine many other places where agriculture and population would only benefit from such amounts of warming.

It's not so likely that USA+Canada+EU+Russia will make huge investments to fight a process that won't hurt them but will hurt, say, Africa and southeast Asia. If you want to convince people to take action, then it's important to focus not on global damage but on local effects, since those are far more important to both decision-makers and voters.

And this is not world map.

Yep. Someone should remove the word 'global' from the HN title. I don't think it means what they think it means.

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