Tim Worstall

We’re All Going to Die!!

No doubt you will all have seen this new report on climate change out today. A paper in Nature, mass media coverage, all the headlines stating that temperature might rise by 11 oC. I’m following up on this as best I can but something seems not quite right. From the website, Climate Prediction I get a few bits and pieces that just don’t seem to make that much sense, that jar a little.

In June 2004 an extension to the original experiment was launched. Building on the publicitiy surrounding the
release of ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ in cinemas around the world, this new experiment investigated the effects of a
thermohaline circulation (THC) slowdown on the World’s climate.

That doesn’t sound all that scientific to me, unless they mean they used the publicity to get more people to download the software (the simulations are run on home PCs, just like the SETI stuff). If they mean that the movie gave them the idea to slow down the THC, well, makes me very dubious.

The other thing is that they report 60,000 completed runs, of which the vast majority are not stable. From what I can see, not stable is used to mean that they are nonsense. More as I find out more.

Aha, got a copy of the paper.

In

8 responses

  1. sean morris Avatar
    sean morris

    Have a lookies at this then!!
    >>that the climate reconstruction of Mann has passed both peer review rounds of the IPCC without anyone ever really having checked it.<< Rob van Dorland of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute ,Van Dorland is a lead author on the next IPCC report due in 2007 this all gets hotter by the week. Ya dont say!!

    Reply
  2. sean morris Avatar
    sean morris

    sorry i forgot to put the link it..
    http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/financialpost/columnists/story.html?id=0b640715-bbdd-4b42-a047-7e2d90b8e495

    Reply
  3. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    If you look at books written before the Global Warming religion came into being, you’ll find that spells of warmer weather – e.g. when the Vikings were farming in Greenland, or the Early Bronze Age people were growing grain at 2000′ altitude in Britain (where the tree line is now at about 1000′)- were referred to as “climate optima”. And it seemed to be accepted that climate did indeed change, without any need for puritanical explanations in terms of man’s sins.

    Reply
  4. Pat Curley Avatar
    Pat Curley

    Tim, came over from your TCS column (and saw your posts at Wizbang and InDC earlier). The lack of a mention of nuclear power is not as surprising as it might seem, given the people doing the recommending. You might be interested in poking around the Center for American Progress’ website. It’s a liberal think tank founded by John Podesta, with Eric Alterman, Gene Sperling and Ruy Texeira among its fellows. I realize this is attacking the messenger instead of the message, but it is important to note that this is a political document, not a scientific one.

    Reply
  5. Paul Zrimsek Avatar
    Paul Zrimsek

    A strange report from the Grauniad:
    ———————————————-
    Prof May’s warning comes as British scientists, in the journal Nature, show that emissions of carbon dioxide could have a more dramatic effect on climate than thought. They say the average temperature could rise 11C, even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were limited to the levels expected in 2050.
    ———————————————-
    There is nothing in the Nature report, as reprinted at the Climate Prediction site, that would even remotely lend itself to this interpretation. (I have not been able to access the supplemental information at Nature’s own site.) The report makes it quite clear that the study (1) is not intended as a forecast, but rather to estimate plausible outer bounds for CO2 sensitivities for the purposes of evaluating models that ARE forecasts; and (2) assumes an instantaneous doubling of atmospheric CO2, which as far as I know is not predicted by anyone to occur by 2050.
    As for the study itself, it seems pretty innocuous given its limited aims. The only thing that really raised my eyebrows was the way the authors threw away their low outliers but not their high ones.
    Tim adds: That all makes sense. I’m still confused about the number of simulations though. Back in October they announced 40,000 runs. The paper has 2,600 or so. Then many are thrown away, leaving 1400 or so, and then it looks like the final figure is 450 or so.
    Where did all the others go? I just don’t get it.

    Reply
  6. Paul Zrimsek Avatar
    Paul Zrimsek

    Guessing that a “run” is the same thing as a “simulation”, Tim, I would venture that the difference between those first two numbers reflects the fact that the paper reports their *first* results, and that the remaining 37,000+ took place while the paper made its way through the review mill. At least some of them were apparently in support of their new project about the thermohaline circulation, which is beyond the scope of the paper.
    The last and smallest figure has to do with the fact that they were experimenting with two things at once in their study: first, with various sets of assumptions having to do with atmospheric physics, and second, with various perturbations to the initial conditions they feed into the resulting model. The low number (414) is the number of “model versions”, or unique sets of physical parameters; for each of these they ran one “simulation” with *each* of the different sets of initial conditions– though I don’t understand how they ended up with a number of unique simulations (2017) which is not only a non-multiple of 414 but a prime to boot.

    Reply
  7. -keith in mtn. view Avatar
    -keith in mtn. view

    What about the evidence that Mars’ polar caps are melting, we’re kinda two peas in a solar-system pod aren’t we?

    Reply
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    juliavanderbat

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