Climate adaptation steams forward with an accelerated speed that can be seen through the Climate Adaptation Summit in January (see previous post), the ECCA 2021 in May/June, and the upcoming COP26. Recent extreme events may spur this development even further (see previous post about attribution of recent heatwaves).
To aid climate adaptation, Europe’s Climate-Adapt programme provides a wealth of resources, such as guidance, case studies and videos. This is a good start, but a clear and transparent account on how to use the actual climate information for adaptation seems to be missing. How can projections of future heatwaves or extreme rainfall help practitioners, and how to interpret this kind of information?
The role of climate information
My general impression from the said meetings on climate adaptation and other sources is that it is assumed that the regional climate information is in place, and using it is a little like plug-and-play. One example is the ECCA 2021 Climate Adaptation solutions on YouTube provided by ERA4CS.
The use of climate information is discussed in a recent Podcast about “CORDEX-Africa”, where Dr. Chris Lennard from the University of Cape Town takes us through different aspects of climate change adaptation. His South African research group (CSAG) has some valuable lessons to tell.
The use of climate information is not straightforward, however, and a concern is that neither organisations such as the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), nor the COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) have had a prominent presence in the said high-level summits, despite the strong reliance on downscaled results in both climate adaptation and climate services.
A vast collection of data
Nevertheless, Climate-Adapt does refer to data and climate indices from Copernicus C3S, which offers an impressive collection of data. The sheer scale of the data gathering and observations was underscored in a recent general assembly with invited prominent speakers (Gavin among them – recordings of the seminar are available through this YouTube playlist).
Still, it’s hard to find a comprehensive guide or a handbook on how to actually use the data and what not to do with it. Computer calculations are not the same as observations, and global climate models are no ‘digital twin’ of the real world – so the question is how to interpret the numbers.
Regional climate information for society
In a nutshell, impact researchers and the adaptation community need to use the best information in the right way. Data and information are not the same thing.
The good news is that there are some initiatives on climate change adaptation which involve climate scientists such as the Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet Global). Also the European Climate Research Alliance (ECRA) is relevant with collaborative programmes on the Arctic, high-impact events, changes to the hydrological cycle and sea level.
More emphasis on methods and tools than actionable information
There may also be some practices within the climate science community that provide obstacles to climate change adaptation. For outsiders of the climate science community, a recent CORDEX white paper doesn’t appear to address issues really relevant to climate change adaptation, despite a new emphasis on “Regional Climate Information for Society” (RIfS) and “Lighthouse Activities” (“My Climate Risk”).
Some of the headlines from the CORDEX white paper are ‘Smaller domains with finer resolution’, ‘Increasing complexity’ and ‘Exascale computing’. Such activities may in time enhance our understanding of regional climate risks, but it’s difficult to see how they enhance the capacity of society in terms of climate change adaptation right now. After all, there is some urgency in getting on with climate adaptation.
Finer resolution makes sense if the aim is to improve the representation of small-scale processes in the climate models, such as convection. But from a practitioner’s point of view, it would be fairly trivial to get information on fine resolution – the weather statistics doesn’t change all that much over small distances, and if it does, it’s probably due to systematic geographical effects which can be predicted through statistical means.
Different choices give different answers
For climate adaptation, we want to know what local consequences we can expect from a continued global warming. The global climate models (GCMs) are not designed to provide such details, as they typically compute wind, temperature and humidity on scales of about hundred kilometers.
The GCMs are nevertheless useful for climate adaptation, since the local climate often depends on the ambient large-scale conditions. Local consequences can be estimated through a strategy known as ‘downscaling’.
Downscaling can be defined as the procedure of adding new relevant and reliable information to GCM results, such as how the local response depends on the large-scale conditions that GCMs are able to reproduce, and how local geographical conditions play a role.
There are two main approaches to downscaling, (1) dynamical downscaling, involving regional climate models (RCMs), and (2) empirical-statistical downscaling (ESD). Both are supposed to be included in CORDEX, although CORDEX’s main emphasis seems to be on RCMs.
Sources of additional information
The source of new information in ESD is the historical data and mathematical theory concerning their statistical properties (hence ’empirical-statistical’). For RCMs, new information is introduced to the GCM simulations with finer resolution and more detailed representation of the surface.
There appears to be several different perspectives on the issues concerning downscaling, and it’s likely that we do not always understand each other within this discipline. For sure, there are lots of different opinions and approaches regarding downscaling, which also may give different answers.
Common limitations of RCMs
Results from RCMs are frequently different to observed climate, and so-called bias-adjustment is often required to correct for systematic biases in RCM simulations of temperature and rainfall.
An important difference between ESD and bias-adjustment is that the latter doesn’t involve the dependency between large spatial scales, that are well reproduced by GCMs, and local details. Bias-adjustment is also a controversial solution.
The reasons for systematic biases in RCMs are unclear. One may be that RCMs are often physically inconsistent with respect to the driving GCMs, which may involve different outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) at the top of the atmosphere over the same atmospheric volume. This is also what we should expect from different rainfall patterns and cloud climates being simulated by the GCM and RCM, which imply differences in the vertical energy flow.
The atmospheric humidity within the same volume of air may also differ in the RCM and the GCM, and they often use different parameterisation schemes to represent small-scale processes, and usually different accounts of surface processes and aerosols.
Different kinds of information
Another point is that the average rainfall over a grid area of ~10 × 10 km2, typically provided by an RCM, is expected to have different statistical properties to rain gauge data collected with cross-sections of the order of centimetres. Hence, the RCM results do not strictly represent the same aspects as those observed in the rain gauges.
RCMs nevertheless have great value in the context of experiments and studies of how different phenomena respond to different boundary conditions, such as convection or how heatwaves are exacerbated by low soil moisture. They can also add value when used to address specific research questions or test hypotheses concerning regional climatic aspects.
A comprehensive downscaling approach
One question is whether the caveats with RCMs affect their ability to simulate climate change. It could be that all the members in the traditional Euro-CORDEX RCM ensemble have systematic biases with the same sign. A more comprehensive approach to downscaling can ensure more robust results, which involves combining RCMs and ESD.
RCMs and ESD have different strengths and weaknesses, which is a good reason for why it’s important to bring them together to overcome the said limitations. For instance, both ESD and RCM assume stationarity – the former through downscaling dependencies, and the latter through upscaling of unresolved processes (‘parameterisation schemes’).
Moreover, RCMs and ESD add information on regional scales based on different and independent sources. The probability that both are wrong the same way is smaller than either one of them being wrong. Furthermore, they both complement and support each other. RCMs offer descriptions that are not available from ESD, such as fluxes and a complete coverage.
A combination of results from both RCMs and ESD means adding more information to the equation, and hence enhancing our understanding of how robust the results are and what measure of uncertainties is present.
Robust information when downscaling applied to large number of GCMs
It is important to ask exactly what information is needed for climate adaptation and exactly how it is used. For instance, relying on results from a single dynamical downscaling exercise with one simulation by an RCM and a GCM is clearly unwise, because if we chose another GCM/RCM simulation to downscale, we would get a different answer.
In fact, involving only a small set of driving GCMs (n < 30) is likely to give misleading results because of a pronounced presence of stochastic fluctuations (“natural variability”) and ‘the law of small numbers’. This is true even if the models themselves were perfect. It’s a bit similar to having too small statistical samples.
With ESD, it’s possible to downscale large multi-model ensembles of GCMs because ESD doesn’t require as much computational power as the RCMs. ESD is usually computationally cheap and can often be carried out on a laptop while an RCM often requires high-performance computers (HPC).
Most climate services seem to be limited to one approach
Many national climate services are presently providing regional climate information entirely on the Euro-CORDEX RCM ensemble, which excludes ESD. We can get some idea of the use of local climate projections solely based on RCMs from Climate-Adapt:
Copernicus C3S also presents downscaled results only based on RCMs, which in my opinion may give misleading information because of the reasons stated above.
It is also unfortunate that there are two separate CORDEX white papers, one written on RCMs and another on ESD, because they may reinforce “silo thinking” within the downscaling community. Such a limited representation is like inviting guests for a big dinner and only serving potatoes.
My point is that it’s important to include both ensembles of RCMs as well as ESD applied to large multi-model ensembles, in order to get robust and the best information about how local climates may change in the future.
Another point is that climate adaptation should not only involve this linear downscaling chain, but also a “bottom-up” approach with sensitivity analysis and stress testing. The latter may not be scientific, but may still provide useful input to adaptation strategies.
Quality and reliability can be enhanced through scientific debate
I think we need more scholarly discussions and more scientific debate about the use of downscaled climate information because we have an increasing responsibility for providing decision-makers with the best guidance on how to use it. Hopefully there will be more debates after the pandemic.
Such professional debates should include climate scientists, the adaptation community, and practitioners. This question is relevant for the said climate change adaptation summits, and for this reason, it is important that scientists from organisations such as Copernicus C3S, NASA, WCRP/CORDEX are present at such meetings and give key note presentations about the state of the science on modelling and downscaling. Also, best practices could be summarised in handbooks on how to use downscaled projections.
I also think there also needs for more discussions within the downscaling community, and I recently published a discussion paper in the journal GMD which I hope can stimulate some debate about downscaling and climate adaptation (critical comments are encouraged – interactive public discussion until 03 Sep). Debates about downscaling should be maintained and evolve over time. One topic to discuss further could be protocols for evaluation of the regional climate information.
We should expect to learn continuously as we go along, as models improve over time with development in computer capacity. Also there is continuously new data coming in from observations and new cases of extreme events. Hence, climate adaptation should be regarded as a moving target and the debates should be expected to be ongoing.
Mr. KIA: “I don’t know how that can be.”
Truly, you could probably say that about anything. Your ignorance is truly encyclopedic.
@ 72 R. Ladbury
So, you are an advocate of statistics?
I am not so fond of statistics, and can wonder why.
Personally I hardly use more than Poisson- statistics, probably because it may be appliciable, and especially quick and easy.
But thinking it more over, I come to believe that Gauss` and other statistics was very slow and clumsy and thus hardly practical until fast computers were invented and became common.
But then it also really took off. And became a brand new modern mania for less qualified, speculative workers, similar to the history of motorized cars. Common people people began driving like crazy, and to pay like crazy also, for those wehicles. And often got both fooled and crippled by them.
Think of that, it is the history of many modern and synthetic methods, inventions, tools, and popular consumer products.
So one ought to think a bit more over how they could manage and judge and plan and discuss it before all that statistics was made practically available by fast, programmable and cheap computers?
It is really not very long ago, so someone ought to remember.
I do tend to remember.
But that is also because I have been quite occupied with technical archaeology and the history of nature and of learnings for professional reasons.
For instance, try and think of it in terms of especialle long and slow and heavy processes in nature and compare by that instead of having to compute statistical means by an enormeous lot of punctual “data” when it comes to “climate”.
It hardly takes so many measurements in order to judge and conscider the history and the situation of a glacier or a desert or a mighty river or a large lake, or large temples and ruins and weathered stones, or a coastline with an obvious, very long history.
That is what people have had to manage and to master and think in terms of in the best cases, if they necessarily had to know better.
And it should not be forgotten, being just replaced by “statistics”
Those who deny, ignore, and even hate, even mis- use statistics, could perhaps better be shown to those traditional healthy alternatives.
To address the question as to how we know recent CO2 buildup is caused by humans:
https://climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-know-build-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-caused-humans?fbclid=IwAR0M9cWQy4HkFj-36pkoa7vMCsAWShBGWJivIn58iToHbkvqq4gLc7APuLo
Of science deniers like KIA won’t bother to read and learn facts. And their idea that there is “legitimate doubt”. Hint: There is absolute none by any legitimate peer-reviewed climate scientist or climate science professional organization in the world. Of course we also know you are too coward and insecure to admit to being wrong with that epic cognitive dissonance.
@nigelj#67
“I find is diabolically hard to figure out what you are saying about anything…”
… and I find it devilishly difficult to understand what your problem of understanding is based on. The agricultural conversion of water management from groundwater to river water cannot be so difficult to understand.
It should also be clear to you that this will allow many groundwater levels to be replenished.
The costs ? – Ask your local pipeline builder and/or the prices for rain barrels and garden hoses in the next hardware store round the corner – but also the local water administration, who possibly can later sell you the additional amount of water that has been diverted. It is an investment (as with renewable energies) that pays for itself over the years. Probably 100-1000 times cheaper than the global conversion of the fossil machine park.
With this calculation, of course, you would theoretically have to offset the additional costs that you incur if the sea level continues to rise, crop failures, forest fires and flood events…but please do not tell me that a homeowner goes bankrupt because he got to buy a rain barrel or a kilometer of garden hose.
If you could then understand that additional volumes of water diverted, which evaporate over land (instead of entering the drain, river and sea) inevitably contribute to the formation of additional clouds, a lot would be gained to save my nerves.
This additional volume of evapotranspiration will in turn lead to new clouds and with a high probability (70%) they will rain down over land areas again. In this way, not only is the same water distributed horizontally across the land, but also where it precipitates it ensures additional vertical, latent heat flux dissipation and renewed cloud formation. Typically intensified water cycle – as long as there is enough water on land.
So there is a certain multiplier effect. It is precisely this multiplication effect that makes it more difficult to estimate the globally cooling effect of cloud cover created by my concept. For additional 1335km³ I estimated a radiant forcing of ~ -0,2W/m² – just to give you a number.
@corbomontanus#74
“Rumors of less clouds in recent years and that being the real reason for global warming,… I do simply not believe it. Because it contradicts Aristoteles`”What goes up must come down!
Living in Norway it`s hard to imagine arid or semi-arid areas. But 1/3 of the land mass (50 Mio. km²) is covered by deserts.
To find out more about dwindling cloud cover:, on my website I recommended the information from ISCCP / NASA.
There is now also better information in the IPCC reports about the negative, cooling net-effect of clouds.
That would be also the right platform where to inform the global political decision-makers about how important and climate-critical the correct use of water is(not only CO²-emissions). You can also look again here @ #30 where a link to Prof. Martin Wild(ETH Zürich) gives you a clear understanding of the different radiative balances and CRE = -19W/m². He was/is one of the main authors of IPCC.
C: “Water has saved us and water will save us further,…”
Tell this to a Morrocain or Spanish farmer, who had to give up their land due to the lack of water. They have to pump up their water from 500-1000m depth with really high costs – and more and more fountains are now sucked up and empty. Spreading Desertification ! have you ever heard about that ?
The lowering of the sea level rise with simultaneously increased cloud formation and the associated cooling of the earth temperatures is a similar hard work for the global community as saving CO2 emissions – with the big difference that additional clouds promise immediate cooling due to their short stay in the atmosphere(8-9days). While today nobody knows whether the currently still rising greenhouse gas concentrations can be stopped at all by 2050.
– And please do not send anyone to Wikipedia to discover Clausius/Clapeyron as long as you have the level of a nose pick yourself.
Hi. I didn’t see your original post. Would you direct me to it?
It sounds like (with little data cuz I didn’t see your post) your ideas press some of the same levers as my ‘Lateral Levies’ concept. You can look it up on RC. The basic concept is to change the direction of levies from parallel with the river to perpendicular. The idea is that a limited flood, say 2 to 3 feet, is beneficial. It nourishes the land. It slows downstream flood waters. It broadens the water’s ‘front’, reducing force. Stuff doesn’t get ripped to shreds.
The Lateral Levies are paired with linear dry wells that are filled with carbon-absorbing (in the presence of water) rock. This recharges aquifers while drawing down carbon.
The Lateral Levies’ tops are horizontal so they peter out a ways from the river. A parallel levy is built there to protect the river from floods. (Yeah, Scotty was right. If you’re in a fix, reverse the polarity!)
So, point me to or fully describe your ideas, please.
Matthias Schürle @105, thanks for the clarifications, but its not up to me to research those costs. YOU have to answer this question: What would your scheme cost “in total” to reduce rate of global sea level rise by for example 1mm year? Until you can calculate at least approximately, we have no idea whether it would be worth bothering with your scheme! Nobody will take you seriously. It might be so expensive its not worth the effort.
It’s not easy but you have to figure these things out, or find someone who will for you. Personally I find your creative ideas interesting and useful, but you must be able to prove viability and quantify total costs. Ditto with the ideas about clouds. My job combines creativity/ technical/cost analysis/ project management. I have to do these things.
Carbomantus #103,
Yes and No.
The process by which ‘technology’, (and science and so on) has changed (and changed us) is not mysterious; it takes time for the old guard to die off, and for a time there is a less-than-optimal mixture of skill and how things are learned and understood…the two cultures interfere with/reduce each other’s efficiencies.
The problem isn’t computers making things easier for people like Ray and others; the problem is being able to fully integrate the new tools with what you correctly describe as “having to know better”, back in the day.
Maybe you should accept that, at some point, people who have grown up in the new paradigm will be achieving the same kinds of growth in understanding, but at levels of complexity that would not have been possible before.
So look at this:
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/266/watching-the-land-temperature-bell-curve-heat-up-1950-2020/
If I were teaching, and had the resources available for my students, I would expect them to conceptualize what is happening by varying the inputs and parameters and so on… e.g. as I said earlier by using different baselines.
It’s the same mental process as always; we internalize the relationships, regardless of the tools we are using to visualize them. The problem is for the people who forget that the map is not the country.
Zebra
I have learnt different on this, and also studied it.
We were introduced to Thomas Kuhns philosophy, and one of the lecturers ideas ( maybe his own?) was that knowledhe does not accumulate to higher and higher levels and complexity. It is rather like a searclight that is mooved through the terrain and through history. Thus things also fall out of the light when new things come into into the light.
To my knowledgeb and experience, and I have worked for years on the re- construction of a lost and forgotten craft, new methods and tools and thoughts make older things obsolete.
It is even politically fought and badgered in order for “the new and modern way” to be able to compeat. Necessary helping andc assisting crafts and trades and traditions of thought are badgered and forbidden. It is an ongoing generation- conflicts and even civil war. that runs on from revolution to revolution..
Example: I was never industrialized, and took over a lot of thought methods tools and traditions from my parents and grandparents in order to be independent band able in neverydayn life, Whereas others were “updated” on the same. Then it came to doorlocks and irons in an urban house restauration from 1850.
If you ask a locksmith to repairv that, the cylindric yale- lock has been invented, and he will disqualify that old lock because the locksmithn is no locksmjityh anymore. Hewill take out the whole door, because he simply never learnt the craft from his grandparents inn that trade. There has been a major break of learnings and style in that profession.
But I happened to have it, I saw immediately the methods from my grandfathers workshop from before the inventionn of the “Autogen” welding devfice and. even the introductionn of cylindrical spiral bores. So i took it easily.
And from quite another but contemporary trade, instrument and to0olmaking and gunsmiths.
But, I can tell you, I had to tackile and to withstand 10 systematic prohibitions and injucktions from the architect and his arbitrary rather ueducated folks , in order to come ahead with those autentic and much more efficfient, quick, and cheaper, original techniques for suchn purposes, from 1850.
In those days they could not afford anything else and did not know of anything better. Gothic chastity belt locks were utilized up untilm 1935, ande I have vseen the same on Museum in New England. The pioneering style, they knew nothing more safe and cheap than that
But, all those prrohibitions and injunctions were clearly also what those “modern” industrial workers and experts of yesterday had learnt in their “factories” in order to sell and to0 defend their skillsw andv their trade, against hard competition from the days before yesterday.
Another obvious thinjg:, if the forge and the blasted coals isn`t hot anymore, traditional carpentery by archaic rather mideival tools (that you see on then Bayeux- tapestery, ), and by handpower, becomes helpless.
(They went to the shore, chopped raw wo0od, knit it totgether and set over, and burnt their ships behind them. As easy as that.)
Thus simply forbid the blacksmith and his open fire next door, , and you get rid of the very pre- industrial carpentery also.
Further, forbid the foot and the inches and order then Millimeter instead,
Then the very simple and rational thinking and rules and consequenses of the old ships or that old house… becomes severely upractical. Cannot be easily repaired by anyone, , and will fall apart.
I found this first on Baroque and renaissance, musical wind instruments. That very tecnical system and possible full undertanding of it, that could enable very consequent and highly refined works in those days conventional compulsary schooling for craft, becomes severely intricate and impossible.
So that rather modern times, Yamaha and the synthetizer can compeat and take over.
Introduce the radio, the loudspeakerv and the gramophone, and people will stop singing at work.
Marshall Mc Luhan , anothe philosopher, wrote that “The media is the message!”
That is another quite fruitful theory. By the logaritms and then the handy digital scientific computer, the succesive halving and doubbling (=Egyptian!) and counting by fingers and remembering that by heart… gets forgotten and lost,
Together with the compasses and the ungraded ruler. There is no more need for proper elementary learnings of geometry an aritmetrics in society and in the factories.
Rather “confidence” and “statistics” and monopoly capitalism & trade unions will come to its rights and will be able to compeat
Or simply introduce modern hydraulics and Archimedes will be disqualified.
Really well said. Intelligent wisdom. Thanks for sharing tnose insights and experiences Carbomontanus.
Yet a few here would rather have him silenced, and they will likely continue to judge and criticise for not using perfect english when it isn’t his native tongue. It’s more likely them who cannot understand what is being said due to a lack of effort. How narrow minded and self-defeating attitudes like that can be.
Oh well each to their own, make your own choices. (but should they be allowed to start and run a public campaign against others simply because they have such rotten attitudes – make spurious judgments – can’t work out the meaning presented by others all by themselves? No way).
zebra: “it has nothing to do with “extreme value theory”.”
Au contraire, since he is basing his argument entirely on the long standing maximum daily temperature for several individual sites, it has everything to do with extreme value theory. Note that no scare quotes are required. Extreme value theory is real and important and interesting, despite the fact that it seems to terrify you.
Extreme value theory is to the maximum and minimum as the Central Limit Theorem is to the central tendency of the distribution. Note that the fact that it is possible to carry out a misleading or incorrect analysis based on local maxima does not in any way mean that it is impossible to carry out a good and insightful analysis. You just have to understand the statistics. Hansen does. JDS and Mr. KIA, not so much.
One example of an insightful analysis involving maxima is one that looks at maxima over a large–preferably global, since climate change is global–region. In this case, we find that far more maximum are being exceeded than minimum records.
If you prefer to look at things graphically, that’s fine. However, note that when you look at things graphically, you tend to be looking at the center of the distribution–not the extremes. And that, after all, as I’ve said is where the changes in the distribution will be most evident.
“Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.” Thomas Sowell Thomas Sowell’s observation certainly applies to Ray Ladbury, who can write much and say little of importance.
Susan Anderson,
Thank you for your kind words. It is nice to know someone is at least reading what I wrote.
I also continue to appreciate your humane and pertinent contributions to the discussion.
Carbomontanus,
Actually, the influence of statistics and probability long predates the development of digital computers. John Graunt’s studies of London’s Bills of Mortality (causes of death) pioneered the science of demographics in 1660. The normal distribution was known and in wide use by the 1700s. Statistical mechanics revolutionized our understandings of thermodynamics and materials science starting in the 1850s. And of course, Fisher, Pearson and Box (the only human who ever got along with both Fisher and Pearson) all predated the development of computers. Both the Frequentist and Bayesian interpretations of probability both date from the first half of the 20th century. Finally, the most successful description of physical reality ever developed–quantum mechanics–is inherently probabilistic and statistical, and it was developed from 1900-1920.
Computers enable us to do more, but even without computers, statistics and probability would be among the most important disciplines in modern society. Statistical arguments are powerful. We’re stuck with them.
Peculiar then, how much I have learnt about science and also were able to contribute to it without having learnt too much about “statistics”, and hardly ever been dependent on that kind of methods. and have been quite especially clever and able to judge better in cases of uncertainty variations, and probabilities..
“statistics” is seldom the better way to find out and to establish better accuracy, certainty, and understanding of things.
As it looks to me, it is rather a method of how to employ ignorant workers in car- production and to keep them ignorant. When machines are invented after only few years to do the same, all those workers get unemployed. and are shown to study statistics.
“Proper professional tools make good work!” the shoemaker said, hen ate his soup with the awl.
That he said because he was an incureable, professional idiot.
Higher learnings and enlightment and proper understanding of it first, would easily realize that it rather takes broader spoons for broader, soups..
The applied methods must somehow be chosen and designed phaeno0menologically congruent first, before they are recommended and defended.
Because, by that, not so many repetitions are needed for proper results..
Such more basic and obvious principles are surely stronger than “statistics”, and thus often what really works and decides also..
Not that I am against statistics, but it has quite obviously taken overhand religiously, politically, economically and socially like when motorized wehicles were introduced. and people began driving like crazy, showing and defendingb their cars and their style of driving..
Ray Ladbury #108,
Now I understand, Ray. When you said…and I quote exactly…
…you meant to write:
After all, the whole point of scare quotes is to say that the words may not mean what they appear to mean, yes?
As for what you said about graphical data, that’s truly wacky…without scare quotes. The whole point of the example I provide is that it is a holistic representation, which allows us to see more relationships, outside the narrow boxes in which you seem to be trapped. Thanks for confirming what I just said to Carbomantus.
Well, Zebra, all I will say is that my “narrow boxes” have allowed me to publish and make a name for myself professionally in my chosen field.
They have also allowed me to spot bullshit pretty quickly and to analyze why it was bullshit and explain it to others. Graphical methods can be powerful. I use them a lot myself as a preliminary look at data. However, they are not always reliable. Some datasets span several orders of magnitude, and you can miss important features if you look at them on linear scales or get a mistaken impression on a log scale.
And then there is the tendency of the Eyeball Mark II analyzer to find spurious correlations in data or to miss those that are not obvious or more complicated. Suffice to say that Weaktor relies on his own Eyeball Mark II to be spectacularly wrong about every dataset he comes across.
Moreover, as I said, there is no reason not to apply an eyeball analysis of a graphical representation of the data and then go back and do a statistical analysis to confirm or discard correlations we thought we saw. The reason to do this is that a statistical argument, precisely because it is more abstract, will give you a more general–and possibly more useful and insightful answer about the character of your data.
As I said, statistical methods are powerful. I have benefitted from applying them in my professional work, in my avocations (climate science, mineralogy) and in my finances. If that is trapped, I’m more than happy to be trapped.
Yes, Ray, and Victor is happy with his lot as well, and KIA, and JDS, and Cliff Mass, I’m sure.
As I predicted in my first comment, you are being defensive and at this point evasive and indulging in logical fallacy (argument from authority), just like those folks.
My critique was about communicating/educating/raising the level of discourse on this climate issue… nothing to do with whether “statistics” is useful in various applications. Unfortunately, you are unwilling to have a reasoned dialogue if it means acknowledging that your pontifications might have been less than perfect… a lot like Victor and his eyeball, I think.
I’ve accomplished things in my life too, but I don’t think I should stop learning, or challenging myself to do better.
Zebra,
I “pontificate” based on my area of expertise. Some folks evidently find the perspective illuminating. You evidently do not. That is fine.
I certainly make no claim to perfection. And I hardly think I’ve been defensive. There is a difference between defending what one has written and being defensive. Indeed, beyond you saying you don’t understand what I have said, I don’t see much substantive in what you have written. If I have missed anything substantive, I would be happy to be corrected.
One pet peeve. Argument from authority is only a logical fallacy if the authority one is citing is not in fact an expert in the field. While I am not a statistician (nor do I play one on television), I do understand extreme-value statistics.
You said (my bold):
James Hansen did, and James Hansen fits in the category someone.
So either you are saying Hansen is an idiot, or your “expertise” on extreme-value statistics is questionable.
Pretty basic logic.
I am unaware of any study in which Hansen threw away all but the single most extreme values across decades and argued that that value gave information as to changes in the distribution of temp values over time.. Could you point it out, please?
jgnfld, what Ray said is right there; nothing about “…threw away all but the most extreme values… and so on. Hansen 2012 does in fact fit what Ray actually said.
Why can’t you just bite the bullet and deal with the facts? One of the first lessons I learned in teaching is that admitting errors is an excellent way to gain the confidence of students.
With respect to the actual science, I’ve pointed out several times that what you call “throwing away all but the [whatever] values” is the problem, not that whatever=extremes.
For example, seeing a sharp drop from the initial mean value alone doesn’t tell us if the new mean is to the left or right, or if the distribution has perhaps become bi-modal, does it?
Re. “argument from authority”…
Accepted science is pretty much all fundamentally based upon this dreaded “argument from authority” but where ‘authority’ is defined as a consensus of those qualified to judge the truth of a particular assertion. Since science is inductive (inferential) not deductive, it could be no other way.
That the sun will come up tomorrow because of gravity and rotation is an argument from authority. There is no deductive proof it will and in fact there almost certainly will come a day when it will not. Of course for most of us generalization–also a fallacy incidentally–suffices.
Many nonscientists don’t understand this. In my experience with students, this was due to not understanding the nature of inductive reasoning.
Rationalwiki has a short discussion of fallacious and nonfallacious arguments from authority that you might peruse (in the actual definition of ‘peruse’) to understand this point. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Incidentally, Kiavicswallow’s arguments are very often from the subclass of fallacious arguments from authority known as ‘ipse dixit’ which are particularly silly.
re Kiavicswallow and ipse dixit. That has been my point in the current discussion, and with my earlier comment to you.
The answer to ipse dixit is to ask a question… that is, to require an explanation or justification, not to just respond with one’s own ipse dixit and a nominal claim of authority.
The insertion of jargon (“extreme-value statistics”) is no guarantee of expertise, in fact the trolls do this kind of thing all the time even though they have no real understanding of the terms… the obvious example is “correlation” from Victor. I’m sure you can think of others from the others.
So if one is interested in educating the hypothetical student here, one has to “up his/her game”, because, as I’ve pointed out many times now, the trolls are only interested in creating false equivalence…they mirror the form, even though the substance is lacking in their claims.
If you want people to learn about inductive (and deductive) reasoning, you have to model it. And that would distinguish you from the trolls, because they can’t do it.
101 Susan Anderson kirjoitti:
3 Aug 2021 11:31 AM
@Ray Ladbury
Thank you! You are one of the reasons I keep coming back, pithy and true, as usual.
(don’t mean to insult several others who keep us honest, amongst whom are BPL and others I have no doubt forgotten in this moment)
This BPL? BPL: If you talk to actual third-worlders in real life, they don’t WANT to live a simpler life, they HAVE to. Given the opportunity, they inevitably improve their lifestyles and their incomes.
The conversation was about *intact* aboriginal people, not “3rd Worlders” aka displaced aborigines and/or the world’s poor not living anything like a regeneartive, traditional lifestyle.
Or this one using a Straw Man to cover his Straw Man?
Great answer, K. Just completely ignore the point, but act like you’ve answered it irrefutably. Works every time!
Or this combination Straw Man and Ad Hom?
K 17: However, the issue is not what ANYONE wants, but what they *need*
BPL: With YOU defining what they *need,* I suppose. No, thanks.
I could go, but I think I have made my point about just who keeps who honest around here.
Hmm. You semi-chastise Susan for not including you on her short list. Why do you deserve such an ‘honor’? Because, you believe, you keep people honest.
Perhaps you’d have better success if you stopped ‘keeping people honest’, especially, man, the gal making the list. There are few things that will reduce one’s odds of ever making it to the podium more than to throw shade on the judge’s current decision.
Losers whine. A wise ‘non-winner’ ponders how he can make the cut next time (or doesn’t care much).
@nigelj#106
The costs are so high that a camel is more likely to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.
Joking aside – did you come into life with a $ sign on your forehead, or why are you so much interested in the costs while I am thinking so much about negative radiative forcing from clouds?
But because I have already calculated the costs for my home region as an example, you are welcome to participate (without guarantee) in order to classify the global costs:
– 4km pipeline diameter ~ 50cm, 475L / sec, 15 million m³ / year = $ ~ 4,000,000
– in an urban district of 1250km² with 750,000 inhabitants.
Spread across e.g. 125,000,000km² of global land area, total costs of
$ 400 billion can arise. Happy? – If you would be so kind as to please calculate now the resulting cloud surface and CRE from additional evaporation of 1335km³ diverted water. (smile – just to test your climatic skills as a project manager with mathematical creativity – smile)
Hr. Schürle
What I am seeing, using Google Earth and Google Maps, is a large stony grey zone all through the world from China through central Asia over to The Middle East and over into Africa all through Sahara and out to Morocco.
Looking closer, I see fossile seas and riverbeds everywhere in this stony grey sandy zone, with very intense, obviously traditional Oasis- culture in the dried out riverbeds and inland river deltas.
If you whish to become unpopular in this world, just take in by an Arab and begin stealing his water!
:/I repeat..!/:
The polite way in Sahara when 2 arabs meet on their camel backs, is to give out a glass of water first, before starting any conversation .
Because, who takes out in those areas without bringing with him enough water is either Mad, or a child that has ran away from its mother, and you are due to bring that child back to his mother or owner first, and that does cost!
But by handing out a glass of water first, all doors open.
Just look: It blows over Sahara into the atlantic just heating and drying up. It never rains in Sahara. But the Atlantic ocean goes white under those winds, and mixes well with that hot air. And then it drowns Puerto Rico and Cuba and Texas and Florida.
It only Heats up in Sahara, takes up moisture across the Atlantic, and then it drowns the very State of Texas, (and what an area…)with 12-15 ” inches of water all over.
Eastern Australia has been drowned the same way also several times. And just take a look at the Bramaputra- river system downstream from the high hills of Himalaya. The Assam province gets regularly 10 meters = 30 Ft of water on their heads per year.
Thus this looks like larger systems than what you can arrange or re- arrange in one and only one area or country.
Then take a look at the larger glaciers in Scandinavia and further eastwards in Russia and Siberia. The glaciers lie at the western coast under westerly winds from the Atlantic. Whereas Russia, Ural, and Siberia was never glaciated .
You see the extensions of the last glaciation by Google Maps through thousands and myriads of freshwater pits and pools. like “Pommersche Seenplatte” & Schleswig-Holsteinschen Seen for instance, and typical lack of the same southwards from there. Then lakes show up again in Bayern and by Lago di Garda & Maggiore in Italia.
Further in the meanderings of rivers. Where there is large and very many river meanders, that landscape is surely very old and was hardly ever glaciated.
Look up the enormeous meander systems of Ob Jenesej and Lena, and the Amazonas
This again is what one ought to know about water first..
Matthias Schürle @113 I’m not a money fixated sort of person, but costs are important because they enable us to compare different mitigation strategies to know where to put our money for the best results! $4 billion sounds like a lot of money.
As to calculating the effects on clouds, its not my field. I only indicated that I had cost estimating abilities to get the point across that I’m used to applying those to my own creative field. Its one of those ghastly, annoying things we have to do. Even then I often get consultant advice as well. You would need to employ a climate expert in the area of clouds for a start. Talk to your local university: they might be interested as an exercise. They have the full range of skills you would need.
Killian @112, your comments about BPL. You just make yourself look more and more spiteful, wrong, ridiculous, ignorant, and crazy and off topic. All in one post! That’s quite some skill you have!
please stop taking the bait (I know you mean well, but it’s not helping)
I begin to believe that Susan Anderson is even more interesting than Killian from an epistemological and biological and psycho- pharmacological point of wiew.
Sniffdogs and urine- tests should be applied.
Are you under any kind of psychiatric medication to keep you upgoing and presentable / salonfähig or “fit” for instance?
You are out of line, sir.
You are not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Being an offended internet blogger does not give you the ability to diagnose someone at a distance, nor does it give you the required expertise.
Susan called you on your obvious sexism and homophobia. Other people noticed it as well. Why don’t you put your own house in order before lashing out at people who notice your problems?
Regarding statistics and probability. Not my area, but I recall reading some psychological commentary that much of our decision making as humans is based on mental assessments and computations of probability, both consciously and subconsciously. Its really, really important, and its how our brains basically function. Found some related material including on our brains ability to construct probability distributions:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160829094017.htm
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.596231/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487650/
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00935.x
Nigelj
That may be well and true, wherefore one should not confuse uncertainty and probability with “statistics”.
I do keep that apart from each other, linguistically.
People today as allways may well have been able to judge and to decide well and adequately cunningly in cases of uncertainty and probabiliy, without using and without even having heard of “statistics”.
As I am the one who is rather satisfied & well served with only a bit poisson- statistics, I may indeed be one of them.
I am furter often surpriced the same way, wherever I had to learn of certain ( 0ften quite frustrating also) things, that were told to be basic and essencial , “very efficdient and helpful” to the practical and scientific understanding. And I managed later totally without it, Because I allready knew of more efficient and more plausible ways from other horizons and definitions of science and learnings.
Like: why having to learn it in French when you know it allready much better in Soahili?
Or why read quite minutely that silly application note for ignorant customers, when it is elementary public school pensum of electricity allready?
I only read that for learning better Dutch, Italian, or Russian.
My own , and other peoples mentality interests me more. plus the psyche and “philosophy” of todays “Professi9onal expertise”
The brain make judgements based on _perceived_ likelihood. There is a whole research area started by Kahneman (whose 2009 Nobel is one of the very few to have been awarded to a psychologist…in this case because of the economic implications of the research) and Tversky showing that humans–even probability experts–are notoriously bad at conditional probabilities and risk assessments in particular. (Tversky had died by that time or would have shared in the Nobel surely.})
Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow presents an educated layman’s overview.
Ladies and Gentlemen
I think we must label and referre to name, datum and clock to identify, whenever we quote or beat up or congratulate or give thanks to anyone here, else we will not find back to the lines in the discussion and arguments.
It is not like before when we could state ” @ No. ”
The web- owner ought to do something with that.
It will likely not be a problem in future threads as long as your reply is indented; however, it would be easier to see who you are replying to when you hit “reply” if it was shown automatically by the software.
Testing to see what nested replies look like. Test.
Yes Mr. Knowitall.
We must get aquainted to this, and I see certain and a lot of difficulties by how it does not represent normal and traditional ways of performance and communication, where you can perhaps sing it and draw it also, and dance it and gesticulate.
Different from Not only fight against it.
And listen to more than one instrument or voice in the orcestra at the same time,…
…. and relate and correspond to that, and still have Maestros figure halfways in your vision ,and the theme and the idea and purpose in your recocnition.
Our professor of “history of videas and of learnings” spoke and wrote as he went Emeritus that: “The Internet “IT”” is the recepy of spiritual and soul (emosional) ruin!”
KIA, as usual you miss the point. Obviously we can now reply to people directly under their comments, (and thanks RC). However its useful to still have comments numbered if we want to reply to a very old comment but not using the reply button.. And in case we don’t want to reply as such, but we just want to refer to somebody saying something.
Nigelj
Yes, have the comments numbered.
How can we enjoin it onto the web- owner to get that in order again??
The real problem of the forum is not centered in the lack of numbering of the contributions, but in the unshaven, undemocratic handling of the moderation.
Many of my comments are simply suppressed with or without a flimsy explanation.
Whether that is because, I, as an “artist without certified climate knowledge”, reproach climate science for not thinking about a holistic, alternative climate protection strategy that lowers the sea level AND the earth’s temperature, is an open question. This is a stupid to fatal mistake by the editorial team.
A way to reply to an older comment without using ‘reply’ is copy the comment URL; you can do that by right-clicking on the date/time tag below the commenter name. Or, if you on Mac and can’t right-click, you can click on it, then copy the URL in the navigation box of your browser.
Once copied, that URL can be pasted into your comment.