Last week, the Nobel physics prize was (half) awarded to Suki Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their work on climate prediction and the detection and attribution of climate change. This came as quite a surprise to the climate community – though it was welcomed warmly. We’ve discussed the early climate model predictions a lot (including some from Manabe and his colleagues), and we’ve discussed detection and attribution of climate change as well, though with less explicit discussion of Hasselmann’s contribution. Needless to say these are big topics which have had many inputs from many scientists over the years.
But RC has a more attuned audience to these topics than most, and so it might be fun to dive into the details of their early work to see what has stood the test of time and what has not, and how that differs (if it does) from their colleagues and rivals at the time.
Manabe’s Climate Modeling
Fortunately, Manabe recently wrote a retrospective on his early work in response to receiving the Crafoord prize in 2018. That paper (Manabe, 2019) gives a good overview of Manabe’s particular philosophy of climate modeling which was very much focused on getting things to work, and not worrying too much about the details. He makes a eloquent argument for a hierarchy of modeling where simpler, functional, models can contribute a lot to understanding in advance of the more complete and more detailed versions turning up. In this, he is in violent agreement with Isaac Held, his colleague at GFDL, and indeed most climate scientists.
But let’s go back to the beginning. Manabe’s early focus was on radiative-convective equilibrium, and his seminal 1967 paper (with his longtime collaborator Richard Wetherald, who passed in 2011). The Manabe and Wetherald (1967) paper has been described as the most influential climate paper ever.
The key aspects were the inclusion of water vapour feedback as temperatures increased, and the use of ‘convective adjustment’ to maintain stability of the lower atmospheric column. While not a great parameterization of the complexity of real convection, it served to keep the troposphere and surface linked in ways that match what happens in the real world. In practice, it was a big advance towards realism over the work of Plass or Möller from a few years before (despite the lack of cloud feedback). Two examples of the sensitivity of their model (which have mostly held up) are useful to look at at:
What they showed are the distinct fingerprints of two kinds of forcing; increasing solar activity which warms all parts of the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide increases which warm the surface and troposphere, but cool the stratosphere and above. The source of this result is the spectral resolution of the radiative transfer model they were using, but oddly enough they don’t discuss it at all. In a subsequent short paper Manabe (1970), Manabe extends this result to predict a temperature increase by 2000 of 0.8ºC based on a 25% increase in CO2, which was pretty close. (Funnily enough, this paper appeared in volume about environmental risks that was edited by a young(er) S. Fred Singer, before his turn to the dark side).
Manabe’s subsequent work led to the development of the GFDL GCM, initially just including the atmosphere, but eventually with an ocean, and then the transient results shown in Manabe and Stouffer (1993). Famously, these early results were half the input into the Charney report‘s estimate of climate sensitivity in 1979 (the other half being the preliminary results from Jim Hansen’s model at GISS). Both these predictions have been evaluated in recent years to see how well they did. The time series were included in the Hausfather et al (2020) paper and in the latest IPCC report:
The next step in climate modeling was to couple dynamic ocean models to the atmospheric models, and again, Manabe and his colleagues were pioneers (notably Manabe and Bryan (1969), but more comprehensively in Manabe et al. (1975), and Bryan et al. (1975)). But as expectations increased that coupled models could help climate predictions, there was a growing realization that there was a problem with how they were being designed.
The basic issue stems from the different timescales of the ocean and atmosphere. Given the ocean temperatures, an atmospheric model will equilibriate in a year or so of model time (maybe a decade if you care about the water vapour distribution in the upper stratosphere). However, given information from the atmosphere, an ocean model takes centuries to millennia to equilibriate the deep ocean. The tail of the age distribution for water parcels in the deep Pacific can reach 10,000 years or so. But back in the day, running a coupled model anything like that long was prohibitively expensive. So in order to get a coupled model simulation for near-present, the ocean needed to be ‘spun-up’ for a good while on it’s own, and then, once it was in equilibrium, the coupling was turned on, and voila! a coupled simulation of the present-day climate. Except…
… it didn’t generally work. The newly coupled model would drift away from today’s climate, sometimes with a collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation, other times just towards a much warmer or cooler climate, or with a terrible ‘double ITCZ’. This was a problem because it’s not at all clear that the sensitivity of the simulated climate (which was off in serious ways) would be the same as the sensitivity of the real world. This stymied progress for a while (maybe a decade or so) as people worked to understand why the models drifted so much, and to find ways to fix it.
When I started in climate modeling (in the early 1990s), this was still a relevant issue, though two approaches had been adopted. One, advocated by Manabe’s group (and Hasselmann’s!), was the imposition of ‘flux corrections’ or ‘flux adjustments’ (Manabe and Stouffer, 1988; Sausen et al, 1988) which added artificial fluxes at the ocean-atmosphere boundary that gave the ocean and atmosphere what they both needed to stay stable, correcting for what would have been calculated, and then keeping that fixed in all future sensitivity experiments. This (by design) produced a good climatology, but effectively buried the models’ poor physics. The other approach was to work with models that had offsets from the real world (which you would keep trying to reduce) but would have sensitivities that were more physically coherent.
The implications of the two approaches are difficult to assess without a perfect model simulation to compare against, and if we had that, there’d be no need to worry about drifts. Thus during the early 90s there was a fair bit of unresolved religious-like discussions about what should be done. Manabe was vocal that you needed a reasonable model to play with and make progress, while others were of the opinion that the sensitivity of a flux-corrected model wasn’t informative of the real world, and that using flux corrections as a crutch, was actually holding back work on the physics that would (eventually) remove the need for the corrections in the first place. (Minor aside, I was a co-author on a paper that assessed this concept for a slightly simpler class of model, and found that the ‘flux-corrected’ version was not predictive of the ‘true’ sensitivity Bjornsson et al., 1997).
Over time the issue more or less resolved itself as models got incrementally better and computational resources increased so that longer coupled model simulations could be done more routinely. Occasionally, the issue still comes up (i.e. Gnanadesikan et al., 2018), but I think it’s fair to say that few modelers think it’s a useful tool anymore. For context, 10 out of 17 models in CMIP2 (~1995) used flux adjustments, and 6 out of 24 in the CMIP3 ensemble (~2001), but none in CMIP5 or CMIP6, while each generation has greater skill than the previous one. In his 2018 retrospective, Manabe doesn’t discuss the issue at all.
The proof of the pudding in climate model terms though are the quality and skill of the predictions. A recent paper Stouffer and Manabe (2017), assessed how good the Manabe and Stouffer (1989) predictions were. These came from an idealized 1% increasing CO2 experiment after 70 years, when CO2 has approximately doubled, and so is warmer than we would expect for 2020, but the pattern is quite robust:
Not too shabby!
Hasselmann’s Statistical Insights
[I have to admit to not knowing Hasselmann’s oeuvre as well as Manabe’s, and to my recollection I don’t think we’ve met, so this might need some amendment…]
I think the key paper to look at is Hasselmann (1979), which really set the stage for formal methods of detection and attribution of climate change. Later papers, notably Hasselmann (1997)(pdf) extended this to multi-variate attribution problems (written in tensor notation no less, so that probably helped 😉). The basic idea is that although there are a vast number of degrees of freedom in the atmosphere/climate system, you can make a lot of progress by reducing the degrees of freedom and looking just at the dominant modes of variability changes and comparing them with expected patterns from simulations. A key insight is that depending on how the noise and the forced patterns line up, the ‘optimal’ pattern to detect might not be what you first thought. But note that this was written when “continuous model time series of comparable length to analyzed global or hemispheric data [were] not available”, so the paper is mainly conceptual. It really is only in the late 1980s, and more clearly and with more models, the mid-1990s, that the data became available to really apply these methods.
The challenge with all detection & attribution (D&A) work is that it must rely on counter-factuals – i.e. estimates of how the climate would behave in special cases – for instance, if the only forcing was greenhouse gases, or if there was only natural forcings or only internal variability. Since the real world has all of these things going on at the same time, it’s hard to extract them from the observations, particularly since good direct observations don’t stretch back more than a century or so, and proxy climate observations have their own, increased, uncertainties. But even with perfect observations, getting a full characterization of internal variability would be hard, and perhaps impossible. So in practice, the ‘noise ellipsoid’ in the above figure is almost always taken from control runs of coupled climate models which, as Hasselmann acknowledged, were not available in 1979.
Hasselmann’s work before this paper was heavily related to measurements and understanding of ocean waves and the role of ‘random’ weather forcing on long term ocean variability, and that has been widely cited, and afterwards, he played a key role in developing the MPI climate model (i.e. Cubasch et al. (1992). But much of later well-cited work built off the 1979 paper and involved further refinements on the theme of D&A, often working with Gabi Hegerl (i.e. Hegerl et al., 1996; Hegerl et al., 1997).
These were very much the ideas that set the discussions in climate science in the 1990s. As you will recall, Hansen had declared in 1988 that “the greenhouse effect is here!”, based on a 3-sigma signal detected with the original GISS model. But the ocean model used there was a simple ‘Q-flux’, no-dynamics, module, and so had no ENSO, or other coupled modes of variability. The implicit estimate of the internal variability here was, to be clear, not widely accepted. There are a couple of articles and responses at the time that give a flavor, for instance “Hansen vs. the World” by Richard Kerr reporting from a workshop where Manabe, and Hasselmann’s coauthors (notably Cubasch and Barnett) were present, and the responses from Wally Broecker and James Risbey.
Hasselmann himself commented on this in Science in 1997, after the 1995 Second Assessment Report from IPCC declared that “the balance of evidence” suggested that the greenhouse gas signal had indeed been detected. The figure he showed there:
… supported the IPCC conclusion, and his last line is worth repeating:
It would be unfortunate if the current debate over this ultimately transitory issue should distract from the far more serious problem of the long-term evolution of global warming once the signal has been unequivocally detected above the background noise.
Klaus Hasselmann (1997)
Today, 24 years later, the detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change is “unequivocal”, but we are still being distracted by ultimately transitory issues…
What if the prize had been given a decade ago?
The two restrictions on the award of disciplinary Nobel prizes are that the awardees must still be alive, and that there is a limit of three laureates per prize. For advances made in the 1960s and 1970s, the first is extremely relevant, and makes the second condition somewhat less so. But without wishing to take anything away from the two awardees this year, ten years ago the decision would have been much tougher. Norman Philips published what is recognised as the first GCM in 1955 – he died in 2019. Akio Arakawa was the conceptual leader of climate modeling directly influencing both Manabe and Hansen – he died earlier this year. Of the published papers predicting global warming in the 1970s (as catalogued in the Hausfather et al paper), the authors Rasool, Schneider, Benton, Sawyer, Broecker and Mitchell have all passed. Only Nordhaus and Manabe are still alive – though now both have won Nobel prizes.
But the building of climate models and their application is broader than can be recognized like this. There are no prizes for the people that actually wrote the code for the models – people like Gary Russell or Ernst Maier-Reimer (nicely eulogized by Hasselmann), the specialists who designed the parameterizations, or the teams that developed the inputs and processed the outputs or the technicians that kept the old supercomputers running. In recent papers documenting model development, it’s not unusual to have dozens of authors – not the level of the CERN collaborations, but significantly beyond the Nobel limit. The huge advances in understanding we’ve seen since the 1970s have been the work of thousands of smart and dedicated people all around the world, only a few of which will ever be recognized as widely as this. We should always remember this while we celebrate the winners.
Finally, while it is many scientists’ dream to win a Nobel Prize, Hasselmann’s statement that he would rather have “no global warming and no Nobel Prize” captures the ambiguity that many of us feel in successfully predicting events and trends that we don’t want to come true.
References
- S. Manabe, "Role of greenhouse gas in climate change", Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography, vol. 71, pp. 1620078, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/16000870.2019.1620078
- S. Manabe, and R.T. Wetherald, "Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity", Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, vol. 24, pp. 241-259, 1967. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1967)024<0241:TEOTAW>2.0.CO;2
- S. Manabe, "The Dependence of Atmospheric Temperature on the Concentration of Carbon Dioxide", Global Effects of Environmental Pollution, pp. 25-29, 1970. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3290-2_4
- S. Manabe, and R.J. Stouffer, "Century-scale effects of increased atmospheric C02 on the ocean–atmosphere system", Nature, vol. 364, pp. 215-218, 1993. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/364215a0
- Z. Hausfather, H.F. Drake, T. Abbott, and G.A. Schmidt, "Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 47, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378
- S. Manabe, and K. Bryan, "Climate Calculations with a Combined Ocean-Atmosphere Model", Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, vol. 26, pp. 786-789, 1969. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1969)026<0786:CCWACO>2.0.CO;2
- S. Manabe, K. Bryan, and M.J. Spelman, "A Global Ocean-Atmosphere Climate Model. Part I. The Atmospheric Circulation", Journal of Physical Oceanography, vol. 5, pp. 3-29, 1975. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0485(1975)005<0003:AGOACM>2.0.CO;2
- K. Bryan, S. Manabe, and R.C. Pacanowski, "A Global Ocean-Atmosphere Climate Model. Part II. The Oceanic Circulation", Journal of Physical Oceanography, vol. 5, pp. 30-46, 1975. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0485(1975)005<0030:AGOACM>2.0.CO;2
- S. Manabe, and R.J. Stouffer, "Two Stable Equilibria of a Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Model", Journal of Climate, vol. 1, pp. 841-866, 1988. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(1988)001<0841:TSEOAC>2.0.CO;2
- R. Sausen, K. Barthel, and K. Hasselmann, "Coupled ocean-atmosphere models with flux correction", Climate Dynamics, vol. 2, pp. 145-163, 1988. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01053472
- H. Bjornsson, L.A. Mysak, and G.A. Schmidt, "Mixed Boundary Conditions versus Coupling with an Energy–Moisture Balance Model for a Zonally Averaged Ocean Climate Model", Journal of Climate, vol. 10, pp. 2412-2430, 1997. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(1997)010<2412:MBCVCW>2.0.CO;2
- A. Gnanadesikan, R. Kelson, and M. Sten, "Flux Correction and Overturning Stability: Insights from a Dynamical Box Model", Journal of Climate, vol. 31, pp. 9335-9350, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0388.1
- R.J. Stouffer, and S. Manabe, "Assessing temperature pattern projections made in 1989", Nature Climate Change, vol. 7, pp. 163-165, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3224
- R.J. Stouffer, S. Manabe, and K. Bryan, "Interhemispheric asymmetry in climate response to a gradual increase of atmospheric CO2", Nature, vol. 342, pp. 660-662, 1989. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/342660a0
- K. Hasselmann, "Multi-pattern fingerprint method for detection and attribution of climate change", Climate Dynamics, vol. 13, pp. 601-611, 1997. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s003820050185
- U. Cubasch, K. Hasselmann, H. Höck, E. Maier-Reimer, U. Mikolajewicz, B.D. Santer, and R. Sausen, "Time-dependent greenhouse warming computations with a coupled ocean-atmosphere model", Climate Dynamics, vol. 8, pp. 55-69, 1992. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00209163
- G.C. Hegerl, H. von Storch, K. Hasselmann, B.D. Santer, U. Cubasch, and P.D. Jones, "Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method", Journal of Climate, vol. 9, pp. 2281-2306, 1996. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(1996)009<2281:DGGICC>2.0.CO;2
- G.C. Hegerl, K. Hasselmann, U. Cubasch, J.F.B. Mitchell, E. Roeckner, R. Voss, and J. Waszkewitz, "Multi-fingerprint detection and attribution analysis of greenhouse gas, greenhouse gas-plus-aerosol and solar forced climate change", Climate Dynamics, vol. 13, pp. 613-634, 1997. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s003820050186
- K. Hasselmann, "Are We Seeing Global Warming?", Science, vol. 276, pp. 914-915, 1997. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.276.5314.914
Hr.Gavin
This will be really interesting.
I found a book under the christmas tree “Die Luft in der wir leben” by Theo Löbsack by Theo Löbsack. A concerned scientist Medical doctor and very good author of popular science. He was against coalsmoke and smog in the cities and against nuclear tests in the atmosphere and especially good on thunderstorms and tropical hurricanes. It has been my learnings of meteorology ever since and a best basic learning in order for me to wind up the climate also. It was the Bjerknes and Hamburg- school.
In that book your Fig 16 above was well described, from 1960, and it is very much older, from about 1905 when it was discovered by a manned balloon, later shown every time by the worlds fleet of weather- balloons.
What is new here to me is that the tropopause and isoterm- layer seems steady, and the slope of the lapse rate falls by increased CO2. Rasmus Benestad has written that the lapse- rate is steady but the knick of it in the isoterm- layer creeps upwards. by more CO2.
That must be decided on. Benestad or Mannabe & Wetherald on the lapse rate because it is a main operator in my understanding of the climate and what I can proceed to the surrealists.
Fourteen years or more ago, the Parisi half of the Nobel Prize would certainly have gone to Edward Lorenz.
Correction: in the Hasselmann discussion, fourth paragraph, bottom, the name is spelled James Risbey. Here’s a link that includes all of his letter: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.245.4917.451-c
thanks. And yes.
I agree with John N-G, that Lorenz would have gotten part of the award if he were still alive.
Correction: The reference in “That paper (Manabe et al., 2019) gives a good overview” should be just to (Manabe, 2019).
Didn’t the Lorenz chaos research perhaps lead scientist down a road that didn’t lead anywhere? At small scales perhaps chaos leads to non-predictable models, but it has since been learned that inverse energy cascades may tend to stabilize higher energy, longer-wavelength behaviors that are then pinned as standing wave modes. Topological boundaries such as the equator also provide stability against perturbations, as shown by Delplace, Marston, Venaille in “Topological origin of equatorial waves” https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aan8819
Consider also that Hasselmann’s early research applied nonlinear wave interactions to demonstrate how larger wave swells were formed from smaller ones via energy transfer — a form of inverse energy cascade.
See Hasselmann, K. (1963). On the nonlinear energy transfer in a wave spectrum. In Ocean wave spectra: Proceedings of a conference (pp. 191-200). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
This may be a more productive research path to pursue than working Lorenz equations, and may suggest that Hasselmann was deserving of the prize even if Lorenz was alive.
Agree with you, Hasselmann’s achievement led to a paradigm shift in research. I think it goes back at least to the Tellus article in 1976.
You don’t mention the recent book by Manabe and Broccoli “Beyond global warming etc.” (Princeton 2020) with an extensive reconstruction of his lifelong work. A well worth reading, and a well deserved Nobel prize imho.
The first use of the convective adjustment was in Manabe and Strickler in 1964.
The challenge with all detection & attribution (D&A) work is that it must rely on counter-factuals – i.e. estimates of how the climate would behave in special cases – for instance, if the only forcing was greenhouse gases, or if there was only natural forcings or only internal variability. Since the real world has all of these things going on at the same time, it’s hard to extract them from the observations
OK, that reads like philosophy (counterfactuals) and classical logic.
But classical logic would not help so much here.
Maybe polycontextural logic could help here:
Physics is Organized Around Transformations Connecting Contextures in a Polycontextural World
The rich body of physical theories defines the foundation of our
understanding of the world. Its mathematical formulation is based on
classical Aristotelian (binary) logic. In the philosophy of science
the ambiguities, paradoxes, and the possibility of subjective
interpretations of facts have challenged binary logic, leading, among
other developments, to Gotthard Günther’s theory of polycontexturality
(often also termed ’transclassical logic’). Günther’s theory explains
how observers with subjective perception can become aware of their own
subjectivity and provides means to describe contradicting or even
paradox observations in a logically sound formalism. Here we summarize
the formalism behind Günther’s theory and apply it to two well-known
examples from physics where different observers operate in distinct
and only locally valid logical systems. Using polycontextural logic we
show how the emerging awareness of these limitations of logical
systems entails the design of mathematical transformations, which then
become an integral part of the theory. In our view, this approach
offers a novel perspective on the structure of physical theories and,
at the same time, emphasizes the relevance of the theory of
polycontexturality in modern sciences.
Physics is Organized Around Transformations Connecting Contextures in a Polycontextural World
P.S.: There is no preview window in the RC relaunch, which is a pitty, imho. It was always helpful to see, how RC will layout what was written in the comment entry. I hope my markup creates the result that was intended.
Yeah, BPL. And its not like a fanatic would let a lack of funding stop his/her efforts.
Guy BPL was schooling,
The universe is like a crossword puzzle, but with bazillions of intersecting angles instead of just two. Holes in knowledge shrink in area but deepen as surrounding stuff is built up. This makes said holes more noticable, easy game for hungry grad students and professors to hunt.
And note that the penalty for lying and cheating is excommunication. When someone’s results conflict with expectations they tell the truth (such as the BEST global temperature series).
You can whine, assume, and even pout, but science as practiced works rather well. This isn’t GOPper stuff. You don’t want to be caught cheating.
I think Climate Modelling is more accurate than Ocean Modelling (e.g. sea level change). There seems to be fewer fundamental errors in Climate Modelling compared to Ocean Modelling (https://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2021/10/quantum-oceanography-15.html).
Anyway, congrats to those who awarded the prize, and to those who were the recipients of it.
As pointed out by Gavin, this was needed.
“I found a book under the christmas tree “Die Luft in der wir leben”.”
That was a sequel to the book: “Das Wasser das vom Himmel fällt”.
Gavin, great post. Thanks.
I have looked after once more. I had it in N. translation. 2Luften vi lever i”
Theo Lö0bsack comes out on Wikipedia.. Now I find that original title was “Atem fer Erde”, that I can not remember to have seen.
And references seem to rot a bit on the Internet and on Wikipedia
But in any bcase, luckily, Löbsacks introduction to it in due time has become my great advantage in the climate dispute.
The book under the Christmas tree is called “The air in which we live.” It reminded me of a somewhat complex description of rain used by a German colleague: “The water that falls from heaven”.
Associer le climat au carbone et donc au nucléaire était la seule solution pour la France de vendre l’énergie la plus polluante de la planète. Bien entendu les microcentrales seront installées dans les campagnes pour ne pas prendre de risque en ville … alors qu’ on ne sait toujours pas démanteler les centrales existantes … La France ne peux pas arrêter le nucléaire parce qu’elle fournit le combustible et retraite les déchets pour tous ses “clients” … et tout ça en pure perte (donc aux frais des contribuables …) pour essayer de fidéliser les clients ! Passer aux microcentrales sous-entend l’abandon de l’EPR sur un échec cuisant … on va donc lancer un nouveau système dont la mise en place prendra des années et coutera des milliards, on va donc dépenser encore une fois beaucoup d’énergie pour la construction de ces micros centrales et on ne sait toujours pas quoi faire des déchets à part les envoyer en Russie … le nucléaire civil n’a jamais été rentable et ne le sera jamais, la formule magique de l’énergie infinie n’existe que dans la tête d’Anne Lauvergeon et de Ségolène Royal qui ont berné tous les gouvernements successifs comme Elon musk berne le monde entier avec sa conquête de l’espace et ses voitures électriques …
https://www.mediaterre.org/actu,20210106085019,1.html
Le nucléaire coûte plus cher que toute autre source d’énergie et prend plus de temps à déployer. Les énergies renouvelables sont la voie à suivre.
Translation:
Associating the climate with carbon and therefore with nuclear power was the only solution for France to sell the most polluting energy on the planet. Of course the micropower plants will be installed in the countryside so as not to take risks in the city… while we still do not know how to dismantle existing power plants… France cannot stop nuclear power because it provides fuel and takes back waste for all its “customers”… and all this in pure loss (so at the expense of taxpayers…) to try to retain customers! Switching to micropower plants implies the abandonment of the EPR–a stinging failure… so we will launch a new system whose implementation will take years and cost billions, so we will once again spend a lot of energy for the construction of these micro power plants and we still do not know what to do with the waste except to send it to Russia… civil nuclear has never been profitable and never will be, the magic formula of infinite energy exists only in the heads of Anne Lauvergeon and Ségolène Royal who have fooled all successive governments as Elon musk is fooling the whole world with his conquest of space and his electric cars…
(Google Translate, with a little editing from moi)
Not endorsing all those sentiments, just passing on what was said.
„The next step in climate modeling was to couple dynamic ocean models to the atmospheric models, and again,… But as expectations increased that coupled models could help climate predictions, there was a growing realization that there was a problem with how they were being designed.”
The oceans surface is a material interface which separates air from water – your knowledge concerning the interface is certainly much deeper than mine. I worked as doctorate decades ago on the numerical simulation of these interfaces. I turned out, that the naive approach ( assuming a continuous transition ) results in numerical artifacts which are very difficult to differentiate from physical changes in the simulation. Roughly speaking, we cannot resolve all the timescales in a differentiable solution. The problem can addressed using the integral (a generalized divergence theorem ) form of the conservation laws. I wonder if this numerical problem is addressed adequately in todays climate simulation. From a discussion about climate models, I got the impression that the situation is even worse. Results from on subroutine are plugged in another subroutine without an underlying numerical frame work.
To avoid a misunderstanding, I am not dismissive of climate change, its a very very serious threat to our societies. But predicting a warming, is not the same as the prediction of a tipping point. Even if the yearly average temperature would remain constant (as on the moon) there are still tipping points in our climate system and yes, tipping point can be triggered by small natural changes or numerical errors in the simulation.
There’s also the ocean interface known as the thermocline, which essentially controls much of natural climate variability
It’s possible that a future Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to a solution of Navier-Stokes, and that insight will allow progress in dynamic ocean modeling.
Did Hasselmann guide early climate modeling to the belief that natural climate behaviors were stochastic and therefore predictable only in a rough probabilistic sense? So what happens when some machine language algorithm finds a deterministic pattern in ENSO and reveals that we likely could have made long range predictions of the next El Nino or La Nina and therefore saved countless lives?
Hasselmann as a fine mathematician, but I was under the impression that the Nobel prize in physics was for a model or theory that actually matched the empirical observations to some extent. Ascribing observations to red noise seems a default option when one can’t determine an actual mechanism.
Einstein already received the Nobel for Brownian motion in 1905 that has been verified countless times for actual stochastic systems on a microscopic level, but not for a collective dipole ocean oscillation such as ENSO governed by an annual spring impulse.
Can read Hasselmann’s 1976 paper here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3402/tellusa.v28i6.11316
— K. Hasselmann (1976) Stochastic climate models Part I. Theory, Tellus, 28:6,
473-485
Only science which gets funded persists. If it persists for decades and the number of follower growth sufficiently large, the science gets awards, and the funding body say‘s: see, we did everything right and funded the right projects.
B: “Only science which gets funded persists. If it persists for decades and the number of follower growth sufficiently large, the science gets awards, and the funding body say‘s: see, we did everything right and funded the right projects.”
BPL: You’ve never actually done any science, have you?
Yeah, BPL. And its not like a fanatic would let a lack of funding stop his/her efforts.
Guy BPL was schooling,
The universe is like a crossword puzzle, but with bazillions of intersecting angles instead of just two. Holes in knowledge shrink in area but deepen as surrounding stuff is built up. This makes said holes more noticable, like the deer with a bullseye birthmark, for hungry grad students and professors to hunt.
You can whine, assume, and even pout, but if you want my opinion you’d do much better if you took everything BPL says as gospel.
History is loaded with counter-examples.
You don’t even need facts. Just invoke the standard denialist trope about the Lone Hero proving the entire establishment wrong.
What, with no funding!?
An example would be some network-based machine learning algorithm that borrows spare CPU cycles from computers volunteered from users, similar to what SETI-at-home did a few years ago. See also the IBM Community Grid https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/. Might find something in patterns of data, even perhaps inadvertently.
@ Bernd
Maybe you have a labour union, professionally corporative idea of science and scientists.
It is normally not so.
Discuss Painters first or any other free trade. Pinzels and rollers are in free sale, and ready paints can be bought in boxes and barrels, but it is further free and up to anyone to find the oils and the glues and waters and turpentines and thinners .. to make their own pinzels and brushes and towels, and paint for themselves or for the community.. There is no legal, corporative monopoly on it.
If you are lucky, you can also find and ask a learnt painter, carpenter or Mason or gardener for advice, he will gladly give it and allow you and show you if he is autentic. As with scientists.
Others with domestic electricians and plumbers.
Do not pick into your high voltage net or your communal water under pressure at home,, Order a liceced electrician or plumber for that. But you are still freely allowed to pick and to solder on your low voltage devices off from the net, and mount your garden funnels further on from the official cock.
Here where I live, I can freely repair the brakes on my own car and the spare parts are in free sale. But I am not allowed to repair other peoples brakes. That takes a licence.
You can invent and make and repair your own shoes and cut your own hair. You can even do it for people and take money for it, but remember your due taxes.
Science- Scientists is a free trade. Everyone is allowed to make science and deliver science and to be scientific..
History and rules of this may vary from nation to nation andv even more from one social “class” to the other, but free access to knowledge and the freedom of science is quite deeply rooted in western” civilization, and mainly fought and denied and restricted only by older and more recent illegal dictatorship and tyranny.
Just like for any other operation or craft. You sit there peacefully shaling potatoes or washing the dishes until suddenly, the “unions” step up and tell you that it is forbidden to you because you are not of the right blood and not in the corporation with monopoly on that.
There, we have the cultural collisions also when it comes to Science. That collision rots in an alternative defitition of logics, reason, praxis, and experience, in “Scientific socialism!” on which they have bloody monopoly and patent.
Thus avoid that union. They are not legally in charge in the free world. Today they are struggling quite systematically to take over science also and to re- establish it into their own and bloody tribal national class- alternative. . .
I can ngive you a better rule:
Only science that can perform wityhout getting funded will percist!
Because science it is driven by conscious and spiritual forces, not by material forces.
Aside from Victor’s rubbish, your comment is among the most absurd posted here. You have no facts so you make up a straw man. Epic critical thinking failure, sport. You are on a science site but you have no clue about the scientific method. The way science has been conducted for centuries. Someone told you your like and since it affirms your ignorance, you regurgitate here. smh
Science that captivates the imaginations of the scientists persists. Funding may make it advance faster–or it may not.. And often the situation is the reverse of your view–science that advances gets funded.
No amount of money would have developed a nuclear weapon prior to 1938. Once fission was discovered, development of a bomb became inevitable. It was a question of when. And the $1 billion from Uncle Sam made the when a lot sooner.
Einstein’s Nobel was for the theory of the Photoelectric Effect, not Brownian Motion. Both were published at the same time (along with Special Relativity.) The theory of Brownian Motion was his PhD dissertation.
Correct, sorry. Jean-Baptiste Perrin got a Nobel later for verifying Einstein’s Brownian motion theory
I have a different take. Both Manabe and Hasselmann solved big conceptual problems of huge importance for Humanity — the models were a byproduct. This doesn’t mean that others also didn’t solve similarly important problems, or also make important contributions. What makes Manabe and Hasselmann stand out was not that they developed models, but that they used them lucidly to solve important problems and in doing so they changed the world.
Actually if the prize had been given ten, or even twenty, years ago, it would have strange to include Philips or Arakawa. As much as I cherish both their contributions, Manabe’s conceptual leap was not based on contributions from either of them — closest would have been Fritz Moeller. Likewise Hasselmann; okay, maybe a case could have been to link to Lorenz, but surely Lorenz merits recognition in his own right.
So if the prize had been given twenty years ago, then I would have found it just as sensible as now to award it to the same two individuals.. Then maybe a few years later this would have broadened the acceptance of the physics community enough so that another prize could have been awarded, a few years later, to Ed Lorenz (see also comment by John N-G. above), maybe joint with Tim Palmer. Isaac could have gotten this year’s prize, with Sandrine next in line.
For me this year’s prize was the first modern modern-physics prize. We should not think about who was left out, as it sounds like sour grapes. The beauty is rather, who, because of this prize, can now be included
Manabe was featured in this video
December 10, 1985 – A group of senators and scientists today called for national and international action to avert a predicted warming of the earth’s climate resulting from a buildup of carbon dioxide and other man-made gases in the atmosphere.
https://climatestate.com/2018/02/23/carl-sagan-al-gore-in-1985-2m-slr-5c-by-2100-manabe-macdonald-cicerone-abrahamson/
Gavin: “ In this, he is in violent agreement with Isaac Held, his colleague at GFDL, and indeed most climate scientists.[…] his paper appeared in volume about environmental risks that was edited by a young(er) S. Fred Singer, before his turn to the dark side).
“In violent agreement”? Those seminars at GFDL must have been something. I can already see it:
the CNN series “The tough guys of science”:
– “We have been damn fucking right that simple models can contribute a lot to understanding!”
– “I couldn’t agree more, motherfucker.. Particularly in advance of the more complete and more detailed versions! Let’s make the editor of the volume about environmental risks a submission he can’t refuse!”
Paul Pukite: .” predictions of the next El Nino or La Nina [could have] therefore saved countless lives“?
“countless lives“? ” The next El Nino or La Nina” ???
I did say “countless lives”, yes. By being able to predict the next El Nino or La Nina, farmers can prepare for the expected climate conditions and nations can put in place mitigation measures to reduce the impact of wide-spread droughts and floods that span the world. Or would you rather not be able to predict these occurrences?
In context, here are what I consider the top unresolved applied geophysics problems (besides AGW, which is largely understood):
1. What causes ENSO?
2. Can one predict the next big earthquake with enough lead time?
3. How much fossil fuels are left? (more of a geology problem, but applies tools of geophysics)
4. What causes QBO?
5. What causes the Chandler Wobble?
6. Can one solve geophysical fluid dynamics? (akin to solving Navier-Stokes)
7. Can one predict a magnetic pole reversal?
Which ones of these are worthy of a Nobel Prize in physics if solved?
PP, those seem like pretty good questions , although I think predicting el nino / la nina would help save “quite a few lives” would be more accurate wording, and don’t we have a reasonable idea of how much oil is left from the hubberts peak theory? There seems to be a general consensus that light crude oil has already peaked, so is half gone. This would be one good reason to be starting the transition to a new type of energy economy in addition to climate change.
nigelj says: “hubberts peak theory”
That’s considered a rough heuristic which doesn’t apply probability & stats properly, covered rigorously in our Mathematical Geoenergy treatise (Wiley, 2018). What I am referring to are many of the 3D seismic tools and techniques for probing under the Earth’s surface which could reduce the RCP uncertainty. I suppose this could work either way — it could substantiate that the amount remaining is not worth it, or it could reveal some massive previously hidden reservoirs. In any case, subsurface characterization is definitely is not completely solved.
The “you’re half empty when production peaks” is an unproven rule of thumb with serious flaws. In a word: fracking. A few more: carbon capture and storage, with “storage” defined as “used to pressurize a depleted reservoir so more delicious oil and gas can be extracted”
Fossil fuels will never run out nor will they be defeated economically unless externalities are incorporated. Shame, taxes, and self-preservation will finish off the fossil fuel industry, not the great god Capitalism.
(“Never” = not nearly soon enough to help)
This is a poor way to address the issue of reserves/resources. It does not matter in any practical sense how much of an unrecoverable resource there is. We will, if things do not change, someday use all that is recoverable, whether that be economically or physically unrecoverable.
It’s confusing and pointless to say oil will never run out in terms of addressing the general public and/or policymakers. I strongly suggest people adopt this as a rule of thumb in this and all other similar discussions.
Definitely Bakken and Texas fracked shale oil negated the classic Hubbert peak for the lower 48. A better approach is to apply a convolutional analysis to track the production profile — Google “shock model” and my name for more info.
They are good questions, but not necessarily good “applied” ones – at least if by “applied” we mean “practical”, “providing actionable advice” – or in Paul’s earlier example – saving “ countless lives“. From the 7 listed, I can see only one that would meet the Paul’s
Criterion:
– 2. predicting the next big earthquake – since you can tell people in the predicted area of impact to avoid buildings and start sleeping in tents.
The remaining 6 …. not so much
3. How much fossil fuels are left?” has become increasing moot, since we have to leave most of it in the ground anyway.
7. magnetic reversals may be dangerous to us (and especially to our civilization), but we can’t stop it, and I don’t think predicting the next one is particularly useful either:
– if it comes in 100,000 yrs – who cares, if it comes in 5 years – I am not sure that we can do much to prepare that we could not implement after noticing the early warning signs (poles do not flip instantaneously)
1. ENSO and 4. QBO ) I don’t think they cause losses of “countless ” lives. and, furthermore, don’t think that we can save too many of those that are “lost” (see my previous post)
5. Chandler Wobble and 6. geophysical fluid dynamics, don’t cause, as far as I know, any direct human casualties, and to me it seems like a theoretical pursuit rather than the applied science.
Piotr,
The context was the Nobel Prize in Physics, which includes geophysics. If it was the Nobel Peace Prize, then humanitarian advances would be a criteria — consider the award of the peace prize to Al Gore and the IPCC in 2007.
The 7 items I mentioned are challenging problems in geophysics that haven’t been solved yet. That some of them may have social implications is an aside, as the main criteria is that the research findings should be fundamental, stand the test of time, and involve new physics. The physics does not have to be in the applied category, but any theoretical physics breakthroughs need to be backed by experimental evidence. That’s the reason that they are often awarded many years after the initial finding.
Note: Hubbert’s curve is about production, not remaining reserves/resources. There could, just for argument’s sake, be trillions of barrels in minuscule amounts spread throughout rock around the globe, but if not concentrated, it wouldn’t be recoverable economically… and maybe not at all.
That is, that curve doesn’t tell you how much remains, only that production has peaked.
Paul Pukite: “would you rather not be able to predict these occurrences?
No, I said I don’t think we are losing “ countless lives” every … couple of years (every El Nino of La Nina). Unless one’s ability to count is not their forte, but seeing your posst I very much doubt that this is the case here. So what’s left is that with your claim of losses of “countless lives” every El Nino of La Nina, you have massively overplayed your hand.
Furthermore – even if you are able to tell the governments that El Nino or La Nina will come precisely on June 15 – there is not much the governments can do with your information, How are you going to defend the agriculture in Ethiopia, or stop the wildfires in California, against the drought? How are going to counter the reduced upwelling and therefore reduced primary production off Peru?
It is not uncommon to consider the field in which one has interest to be massively important. Sometimes it is, most of the time – it is not. And overstating the problem is not an innocent folly –
it causes inflation of words – overused, the big words no longer carry the same weight:
after people heard that “ the loss of countless lives” happens every 2-3 years, hearing that long-term effects of the AGW may also cause “the loss of countless of lives”, no longer makes anyone to bat an eye.
You heard about the shepherd, who cried “Countless wolves! ” ? ;-)
“countless lives” == “innumerable lives” which means incapable of being counted and thus the best way of conveying that it is a hypothetical but critical thought experiment to engage in.
So I am not overplaying my hand in this case as it is plainly obvious that being able to predict an El Nino would have been an important forecasting skill over the years. Yet perhaps I am overplaying my hand in suggesting that we <b<can predict an El Nino in advance, which is actually a useful discussion to have. That is not a hypothetical but a serious scientific question and something worthy in the context of this post on the Nobel prize in physics..
Paul Pukite: “ “countless lives” == “innumerable lives” which means incapable of being counted and thus the best way of conveying that it is a hypothetical but critical thought experiment to engage in.
That’s a cop-out and you know it – if you wanted to convey “ incapable of being counted” you would have said something like “unknown numbers “. Instead you CHOOSE the word “countless” which for everybody means : “ too numerous to be counted : MYRIAD, MANY (Webster’s dictionary).
Therefore, you wanted to invoke a MASSIVE loss of life that could have be avoided if we only shifted the research money from research into AGW (which you declared as
“ largely understood” ) and plugged into your, I assume from your highly technical points you have been making on that – your favourite field – ENSO.
But to justify this money shift you NEEDED the consequences of NOT shifting to be TRAGIC,
The UNNECESSARY loss of “COUNTLESS LIVES” every 2 years or so (El Nino _or_ La Nina) would definitely fit the bill. Arguments unexamined are not worth making, eh ? ;-)
I don’t agree with you that AGW – particularly the “applied part” – e.g. changes in in response of climate to different timing and magnitude of our mitigation efforts, as well as the resulting different AGW’s impacts on ecosystems and on humanity, are, as you have put it: largely understood“.
And if the AGW collapses our civilization, it would be truly “countless lives” that will be lost – a large majority of the current 8 bln? Contrast this with El Nino and La Nina which on their own are not likely to collapse the current global civilization and cause the deaths by billions,
and we can’t do any mitigation to reduce and the option for adaptation are limited.
So I find your argument disingenuous, and your inability to admit it – rather disappointing, as I have thought more of you. I stand corrected.
It’s countless because (for example) if subsistence farmers knew that an El Nino was upcoming, then they would know how much seed to purchase or level of irrigation or flood control to prepare for. These are all marginal calls that futures markets would also be involved in, but the latter would be on a monetary scale and not involving one’s survival.
And you are upset that I used the American English idiom “countless” instead of “unknown” ?
This volume on climate extremes should be published soon .. is it hyperbolic as well?
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/255/PYP0OJ.png
Actually, the number of lives lost may be “countless”. Most are lost in developing countries in rural areas–and many of those deaths probably do go uncounted.
Ray, as I wrote to Paul – according to the common usage (and dictionaries) – “ countless ” is defined NOT as “(currently) unknowable because we don’t have the tools to count them”, but as ” too numerous to be counted : MYRIAD, MANY” (Webster’s).
We don’t know how MANY casualties will the next El Nino or the next La Nina, bring. But I seriously doubt they would be COMPARABLE to the “countless lives lost ” due to the AGW, particularly if the AGW manages to collapse of global civilization and the new carrying capacity of the Earth can accommodate only a tiny fraction of the ca. 8bln people we have now.
Hence my argument against causing “inflation” of the big words – if we overuse them to describe things that do not deserve them, then these words loose their power and therefore their potential to mobilize people to action to address that MUCH larger threat.
If everything is catastrophic, then nothing is catastrophic.,
Piotr,
Dictionary.com says countless can mean innumerable, and the innumerable entry says “incapable of being counted; countless.”
So there are two meanings for countless and you apparently are dying on your hill because I implied the meaning that conveyed uncertain instead of your interpretation of infinite.
Long known sign of someone spending too much time on the net.
Paul Pukite: “there are two meanings for countless and you apparently are dying on your hill because I implied [ “uncertain” ] instead of your interpretation of [“too large to be even counted] ”
Fortunately, we can put your claim and your later paternalistic lecturing of me, to test:
1. In your parallel post, you defend yourself by standing shoulder to shoulder with the summary of a AGU monograph about impacts of climatic and meteorological extreme events .
The problem is that the summary DOES NOT say that we are “ uncertain” about the the number of victims or economic damage by such extreme events, but spends MOST of its space to enumerate HOW LARGE were those losses (“ 128,500; 138,000; $268 billion“). So in your own example – “countless” as very large not very uncertain” loss of life and economic damage.
2. In your original post you use “countless TWICE –
– first in how prediction next El Nino or La Nina would “save countless lives”
– then to write: “Einstein already received the Nobel for Brownian motion in 1905 that has been verified countless times for actual stochastic systems on a microscopic level, but not for a collective dipole ocean oscillation ”
Obviously. the second mean “great many of times” not …”uncertain amount of times”.
So, what are the chances that within the span of few sentences you would use the same word twice in TWO RADICALLY DIFFERENT MEANINGS?
3. If I wanted to shift the research effort, money, and prestige from AGW to my field of study (ENSO) – which pitch would be more likely to succeed:
a) We need to shift the research effort from studying AGW (which “ is largely understood” (c) PP) to the ability to predict the next El Nino or La Nina, which will save very large number of lives”
or
b) We need to shift the research effort from studying AGW (which “ is largely understood” (c) PP) to the ability to predict the next El Nino or La Nina, which will save …
uncertain number of lives”
Occam’s razor on these 3 points, anyone ? ;-)
PP: Long known sign of someone spending too much time on the net.”
Don’t think so. I am on this forum to test my opinions and to learn new things from people who know more on a given subject than me. The latter requires trust in the integrity of the expert.
Now if that expert cannot bring himself to admit of being wrong even in such trivial matter and such a open-and-shut (see above) case, how can I trust him in his area of expertise, where I have no way to check whether his arguments are intellectually honest or not.
Piotr,
Which one is it?
I could care less about what you think of my grammar.
or
I couldn’t care less about what you think of my grammar.
Poisoning the well much?
Pjotr and everyone
I think he is native German thus be aware of those inter- linguistic sources of possible misunderstandings on ideomatic level, also in my case.
But I feel educated for it and aquainted to it and know ways to avoid it. If there are reasons for doubt, think semantically and try and repeat the same in other terms for instance, rather than asking that bloody stupid native mother with her silly uneducated “tounge” for adevice and correctures. And the Google translate however impressive many times, is obviously also dead stupid consciousless.
Maybe state the same also in latin or french, and be aware of errors due to narrow mindedness closed societies and backrounds in the provincial slums and burglarshops- sales industries..
“countless”? in German zahllos . I would say Talløs perhaps, but not for that case because it is unprecise. and entails myriads Ukjent Unknown would be better. perhaps say that “I suspect that it is quite a lot..” That seems safe.
And think about the Covid 19, what do they actually die from? And what does that entail for valid and reliable statistics? It is the same problem. Powrity and misery and lacks of law and order and infrastructures make people and societies vounerable.
Paul Pukite: “Piotr, Which one is it? I could care less about what you think of my grammar. or I couldn’t care less about what you think of my grammar.”
So …. you think it is about your …. grammar? Nobody cares about your grammar, we are talking about your character, your integrity, and for a very specific reason:
“ Now if an expert cannot bring himself to admit of being wrong even in such trivial matter how can I trust him in his area of expertise, where I have no way to check whether his arguments are intellectually honest or not?”
And it was not me, but you, who tried to turn it into a pointless GRAMMAR quibbling:
Paul Pukite: “ there are two meanings for countless and you apparently are dying on your hill because I implied [“uncertain”] instead of your interpretation of [“too large to be even counted] ”
To which I replied not with empty declarations, but with 3 arguments, opened to falsification by logic and Occam’s razor. You could not do either, and in its place offer lame efforts at sarcasm.
Here are those 3 arguments, in an off chance if you grew a pair:
Paul Pukite: “you are dying on your hill because I implied [ “uncertain” ] instead of your interpretation of [“too large to be even counted] ”
Piotr: Fortunately, we can put your claim and your later paternalistic lecturing of me, to test:
1. In your parallel post, you defend yourself by standing shoulder to shoulder with the summary of a AGU monograph about impacts of climatic and meteorological extreme events .
The problem is that the summary DOES NOT say that we are “ uncertain” about the the number of victims or economic damage by such extreme events, but spends MOST of its space to enumerate HOW LARGE were those losses (“ 128,500; 138,000; $268 billion“). So in your own example – “countless” as very large not very uncertain” loss of life and economic damage.
2. In your original post you use “countless TWICE –
– first in how prediction next El Nino or La Nina would “save countless lives”
– then to write: “Einstein already received the Nobel for Brownian motion in 1905 that has been verified countless times for actual stochastic systems on a microscopic level, but not for a collective dipole ocean oscillation ”
Obviously. the second mean “great many of times” not …”uncertain amount of times”.
So, what are the chances that within the span of few sentences you would use the same word twice in TWO RADICALLY DIFFERENT MEANINGS?
3. If I wanted to shift the research effort, money, and prestige from AGW to my field of study (ENSO) – which pitch would be more likely to succeed:
a) We need to shift the research effort from studying AGW (which “ is largely understood” (c) PP) to the ability to predict the next El Nino or La Nina, which will save very large number of lives”
or
b) We need to shift the research effort from studying AGW (which “ is largely understood” (c) PP) to the ability to predict the next El Nino or La Nina, which will save …
uncertain number of lives”
Occam’s razor on these 3 points, anyone ? ;-)
========= end of quote ======================
Piotr said:
Noice.
@ Pjotr & al
You are concerned and hooked up into the grammars, discussing Grammars, probably because of the British Empire and its poor linguistic education and enlightment in the Imperial center and widely out in the provinces also.
Large imperial languages like Russian, Spanish, even German are inhibited by that same syndrom.
You just learn that “english” is understood everywhere” and then set to read Charles Dickens for the rest and thus never get any due, facultary philological and linguistic enlightment.
A colleague of mine from New Zealand wrote : “You see, Mr. Kolberg, each word has got a very distinct meaning in English. As a Naiii- tvvv Inglschhh schhhhpikrrr… let me teach and help and correct you!”
His basic troubble of undestanding was rudimentary and proud, London and Irish vulgar Cocney. Englischer Platt,…. his vulgar classical industrial workers warfare and class-race struggle against science and elementary physics and technology, his lacks of Highschool, Baccalaureus 1 and Mittlere Reife, Examen artium, that is due elsewhere exept for the Ååååå straillins.
You can find the same on this presumabluy scientific website from many of its participants.
======0000
Medicine:
First seek up and try and grasp ARTES LIBERALES trivium and qvadrivium. Trivium is logics grammars and retorics. That is supposed to be “trivial”. to you first.
Then comes QVADRIVIVM
Aritmetrics Geometry, Astronomy and Music.
:/I repeat,…./:
Together, the 3+4=7 free arts.
Qvadrivium is not todays dialectic materialism class warfare , macrobiotics ” US rotten politics.. and Music.
Thus I have stated a formula from anxient on contra veteres:
Formula rule:
On reading a message and a text, grasp that it has got 4 hierachic levels obeying and serving under, not ruling over each other.
1, The Hermenevtical level, what is it about? What is actually stated and mjeant and given inside of the closed bible or the text or the box, in the canned hermetics? You may have to take an iron to break it up first before you can taste and judge it. The labels may also be false.
2, The semantical level, how should it be told and served for the receiver to actually grasp and get it? Remember your receivers have their own habits and premises and may not be of your own blood and national tribe, class, or Union.. Not even due to be it.
3, The gramatical level. Watch your grammars and see that it does serve down under the levels 2 and 1 and not rule over semaqntics and hermjenevtics. Gramatical “errors” may well and often be due, adequate, and conscious because of that in intelligent texts. .
4 The Ortographical level, watch your orthography and see that it does serve and obey under, not rule over the levels 3, 2, and 1.
Then you have another very good advice and formula from my side.
This further entails easily for anyone to see that also sheere SPAM! (= slicded and pickled mass produced Ham) may often be inside of the Hermetics (from Hermes,) on Hermenevtical level. However grammatically and orthographically straight and semantically packed and offered on the free market. .
They even sell bullshit that way. It is industrial sales promotion routine on the free market and with “english” orthography and grammars perfrectly in order.
You’re right, but it’s a tad late. GOPpers have used Covid to politicize death. “Countless lives”. Before GOPdom 3000 lives was unimaginable; it hit that “countless lives” vibe in one’s brain. But in GOPland 2000 dead AMERICANS every single day is nothing.
Yes; America has been tragically ‘re-normed’ in recent years. Not only is ‘war, peace; freedom, slavery; and ignorance, strength;’ but treason is also patriotism; poison, medicine; and selfishness, virtue.
If nations have something like a soul, ours is in deep, deep distress. IMHO, of course.
“4. What causes QBO?”
Isn’t that to do with propoagation of momentum into the equatorial stratosphere by waves such as Rossby waves, Kelvin waves, inertia-gravity waves and mixed Rossby-gravity waves? The contributions of these to accelerating the stratospheric winds can be determined through the Eliassen Palm Flux divergence and what I think is called the secondary circulation, denoted v* and w* in the literature.
There is no consensus as to what determines the 28 month (plus change) period of the QBO. Whether it is due to a natural resonance based on initial conditions or a forced response which follows boundary conditions is not even clear. Consider that for the latter, in the stratospheric layer directly above the QBO is the Semi-Annual Oscillation (SAO) which is obviously forced to boundary conditions as the wind reverses direction for every nodal excursion of the sun above or below the equator.
So what could cause a forced response of 28 months following a similar nodal excursion? Well, if one aliases the nodal cycle of the moon (27.2122 days) against the semi-annual impulse, one calculates a period of 28 months + 12 days. This is a gravitational tidal forcing controlling the wind direction for the denser QBO layer. Yet zero consensus exists for this view.
Read the peer-reviews to this submitted article “Long Range Prediction and the Stratosphere” (19 co-authors)
https://acp.copernicus.org/preprints/acp-2021-719/#discussion
The QBO remains a geophysics conundrum because even though it appears to be somewhat predictable, no one understands why.
Paul Pukite: “It’s countless because (for example) if subsistence farmers knew that an El Nino was upcoming, then they would know how much seed to purchase or level of irrigation or flood control to prepare for.?”
How is that supposed to counter my argument about the disingenuity of your argument that we could save countless lives ” every two years or so (every El Nino or La Nina), if we only …. shifted the money into your area of research and away from AGW, which potential victims are presumably …much less
countless“?
Not mentioning that your subsistence farmers would have been the last to be able to benefit from your ENSO prediction research, since being so poor they have very limited, if any, options to counter the effects of the incoming El Nino or LaNina. To use your own example – they don’t have the money to increase their irrigation system to counter the drought the ENSO model have just predicted for this summer.
And how exactly the drought or flood, strong enough to destroy so many crops as to cause “countless deaths”, would have been countered by … buying more seeds? Not mentioning that being subsistence farmers they are too poor to buy extra seeds anyway.
Paul: “ And you are upset that I used the American English idiom “countless” instead of “unknown” ?
Upset? I am not that into you, if you get my North American idiom. And I argued that your choice to use “ countless lives” instead of “unknown numbers” was NOT likely an inconsequential imprecise wording, but one that happened to … advance your argument:
====
Piotr: ” If you wanted to convey “incapable of being counted” you would have said something like “unknown numbers“. Instead you CHOOSE the word “countless” which for everybody means : “ too numerous to be counted : MYRIAD, MANY (Webster’s dictionary). Therefore, most likely you wanted to invoke a MASSIVE loss of life that could have be avoided if we only shifted the research money from research into AGW (which you declared as“ largely understood” ) and plugged into your favourite field – ENSO.
But to justify this money shift you NEEDED the consequences of NOT shifting to be TRAGIC, The UNNECESSARY loss of “COUNTLESS LIVES” every 2 years or so (El Nino _or_ La Nina) would definitely fit the bill. ”
======
Paul: This volume on climate extremes should be published soon .. is it hyperbolic as well?
Quite the opposite ;-) The link you provided, illustrates the weather related deaths and damage, with … “deadliest heat waves” and “hurricanes “, the extremes of which are now typically attributed to AGW. Yes, the same AGW which you have …. just dismissed as “largely understood”, and used that as your argument to switch the research effort from AGW to your area of interest, ENSO. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Piotr says:
LOL, I’m not funded to do any of this stuff, and do it because I’m interested in geophysics. A reminder that my first comment was that it was perhaps premature that climate scientists followed Hasselmann’s lead in assigning ENSO and other climate indices to a stochastic mechanism.
@ P P(@whut)
I have the impression that there has been quite a paradigm- shift in meteorology in the 1960 and 70 ies due to the introduction of heavy computer statistics, wherefore rather “stochastic” model thinking took over Phaenomeno0logical identification of “patterns” and ” maths” and “judgement” on that was the earlier style. that was shown aside.
I do agree that this paradigmatic shift was perhaps a bit “premature”.
During the 1960’s I would also suggest that Lorenz had an impact convincing some researchers that the Butterfly Effect made modeling pointless. IOW, if the behaviors eventually spin into chaos, why waste time on finding patterns? But machine learning algorithms don’t listen to such advice, and will likely reveal the hidden patterns in the coming years.
PP (@w…)
I believe less in the “machine learning agoritms that can listen to…” as long as arbitrary stupid and sinful narrow minded ignorant persons ( = ad hominem) also are programming that and judging- selling their results.
Thus, another scientifric, alytical formula from my side:
Garbage in -> Garbage out
AMEN!
During the 60’s, the computers weren’t physically able to run atmospheric models at any sort of high resolution. Modern machine learning methods wouldn’t divine many patterns out of such limited sized datasets, large time steps, and gross sized meshes either. The “butterfly effect” is a problem any time chaotic variables are included in a model, however the resolution of the computer system also defines how soon the indeterminacy will kick in.
I analyzed what were considered huge datasets in the early 70s on mainframes. They were many scores of whole MEGAbytes (!!!) in size. To this day I still get a kick out of the hero in Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider” bringing down an evil–quite Trumpian-styled–government by scrambling/releasing whole megabytes (!!!) of data!
Anyway, anyone old enough can remember when 3 day forecasts were near meaningless. Now, they are quite good and even 7-10 days out now show a lot of skill. It’s also why the Euro weather forecasting models are generally a bit more accurate than the US: Better resolution based on several factors such as better computers and better data assimilation strategies. GFS recently announced they are doubling the number of altitude levels comprising the atmospheric mesh, so that should help close the gap.
Or in other words, “Patterns” and conscepts must be found and defined by consciousness first, before automats and robots can be made to be and to behave according to it.
Paul Pukite: “LOL, I’m not funded to do any of this stuff”
I said :that you implied the need to “ shift the research money from research into AGW (which you declared as“ largely understood” ) and to plug it into your favourite field – ENSO.” Whether you are (currently) receive funding for working on it or not – is beyond the point..
So how about we talk about the main part of my argument instead? Your know – like that your callout to the AGU Monograph, instead of proving your point – weakened it ?
Or that your other argument on how the precise predictions of when the next El Nino begins will save the subsistence farmers …. even though they can’t do anything with that information ?
Of the two actions you proposed – being subsistence farmers they won’t have
the capital to “ buy more seeds” (even if it helped against a drought so severe as to cause “countless deaths”), and they won’t have the money to “increase the irrigation”, even if they had any.
So, how exactly your precise prediction of when the next El Nino will hit – will be saving “ countless lives” ?
@ Pjotr
I cannot understand this.
I cannot see that a quite much better ENSO prediction and forecast that may be in the scale of 2 or up to 7 years, is different by principle from the rather radical improovement of weather forecast that we have seen in recent years. It saves money and it saves people against disaster at sea and on land, and tells us a lot of what we ought and ought not to do, due to coming weather.
It only has one disadvantage that I can see. People forget how to rather look at the weather for themselves, and to judge it.
But for many years, the weather forecast was the only daily updated program about Nature in the radio and on TV. I have allways liked it. So what about a monthly updated program about the Pacific ocean?
Piotr: even if you are able to tell the governments that El Nino or La Nina will come precisely on June 15 – there is not much the governments can do with your information, How are you going to defend the agriculture in Ethiopia, or
Richard: You’re being non-evil again. Who said anything about governments? Commodity traders can use the information to ensure the hungry sell ALL of their possessions.
Like business cycles. Downturns are when the wealthy shop for burning businesses.
To say that “Lorenz had an impact convincing some researchers that the Butterfly Effect made modeling pointless” is a gross misinterpretation and misrepresentation of Lorenz’s work. Lorenz showed that the level of complexity implies the system is chaotic, which means the representation of the Earth system is not deterministic. Whereas this does not imply that the system is not predictable, it does require a statistical approach and hence ensemble forecasting methods.
Tyson said:
That’s an assertion that cannot be substantiated for all situations (and I’m not talking millions of years). A neat counterexample is the modeling of the Earth’s Length of Day (LOD) variations — there might be some of this that is random (the jury is still out), but the majority is deterministic to first order. This is a model matched to observations I did based on known forcing factors, showing a clear repeat pattern of 18.6 years. Easy to figure out
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img921/1967/Baa0cQ.png
Geophysical fluid dynamics is another issue, but determinism can’t be ruled out on a large scale due to topological waveguides (robust to perturbations), inverse energy cascades, and other ideas considered in recent years. These bigger flows may in fact be more immune to chaos than initially suspected. The patterns are just harder to decode because of the non-linearity involved.
Hr P P (@whut)
Your shown graps are very similar to mono chromatic partial organ pipe servography allthough quite more noisy.
You have longg wave Lambda/2 in about 17 years, and a clear doubble octave superposed probably coherent or phase couppled.. and a much higher frequency of 6 hills in 3 years. probably not phase- couppled.
And maybe also a “Rumble” to it, seen in swinging partial amplitudes.
From this I can say that the graphs seem autentic and that you measure on a predictable physical system.
I have seen it much worse, Sheere pure virtual teoretic sinus all through it with amplitudes totally out of scale. ( Harald Yndestad). That I take fror fake science.
“The patterns are just harder to decode because of the non-linearity involved.”
No, that is not at all my experience. . For crooky work and situations you take crooky methods and tools. The methods must be designed and derived in an understood way from the purpose.
I teach and say that the methods and tools and coordinate- systems must be phaenomenologically congruent. That is what eases it quite dramatically.
Many encryption algorithms rely on non-linearity, as is well-known from cryptography — “Nonlinearity is crucial since most linear systems are easily breakable.” [
Meier, Staffelbach, 1989] . So by definition they should be more difficult to decode. Actually, the ease of inverting linear systems leads to the “streetlight effect”, whereby everyone uses these techniques, even if they likely won’t lead anywhere for many problems.
And just to be clear, this nonlinearity has nothing to do with chaos. Take a look at an optically encoded image using a nonlinear Mach-Zehnder modulation and it’s not hard to see the futility of decoding such an image w/o knowing the key. But if you have the key, it’s a no-loss transfer function.
Paul Pukite: “If it was the Nobel Peace Prize, then humanitarian advances would be a criteria”
What this had to with anything? I didn’t ask whether your 7 questions would meet the criteria for Nobel Peace Prize, nor did I dismiss the value of theoretical geophysical research,
without obvious saving-countless-lives applications.
Specifically – I did question your identifying 6 out of 7 as “applied geophysics problems” , and asked what is their connection to your opening post on the predicting exact timing of the next El Nino, which you advocated for its massive “applied” appeal – providing actionable advice that would save “countless lives“ (which you contrasted with research into AGW, which according to you, is “largely understood”)
That’s it. Sometimes cigar is just a cigar.
I said: which means the representation of the Earth system is not deterministic.
You said: “That’s an assertion that cannot be substantiated for all situations”
To which I reply by way of clarification: The Earth system consists of the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere, and the marine and terrestrial biosystems. Because these components are very different, and are linked by fluxes of mass, energy, and momentum, they form a complex worldwide system characterized by nonlinear interactions. Therefore the representation of the Earth system cannot be deterministic.
The moon and sun should always be included in the system as they provide a forced response mechanism which is known to make even a potentially chaotic system deterministic. Consider that the annual forcing stabilizes the earth’s climate into seasons. Have more examples, but only one is required to falsify your assertion.
And I contend the addition of human action makes it chaotic as a major changemaker of all of those components.
Dr.. McGuffin
You fail to grasp that it also depends strongly on what is to be determined.
Your systematic axiomatic chosmology would rule out and ridicule a lot of reliable scientific investigation and results from elementary geophysics and physical geography….
….. that we are due to know about from public school allready, elsewhere in the world.
Flat earthers and surrealists and spin- doctors ought not to be in charge.
Try Google Maps and Google Earth.
Panta rei means eppur si mouve, but that does not rule out all investigations into what is mooving and how it does moove and in what categorically kinds of agregations and patterns.
“..nonlinear interactions…. cannot be deeternministic” that
That is a bizarre and strange understanding both of nonlinear systemjs and of deterministic.. to determine.
A vaste lot of quite common physical and natural things could not be dealt with in a predictable and resposible way if that was true.
“That is a bizarre and strange understanding both of nonlinear systemjs and of deterministic.. to determine.
In the context of the present discussion we [I} are not talking about deterministic from “to determine” as you say, but rather from determinism, i.e. a lack of free will as in the future state of a natural system is completely determined by its present and past states.
McGuffin
Again, you fail to reallize that it depends strongly on what you whish to determine. We can exel in examples from science and its history.
In the same system, a linear plasmja- spectrum like Frauenhofer lines or the balmer spectrum of an electric hydrogen flame,
Niels Bohr stated: “We must resign on all attempts to visualize or to explain classicaly, the the transistion of an electron from one stationary stage to the other!”
That aspect of it is what is termed “unlinear” or better “a dis- continuity”. and cannot should not be tried determined. Forget quite especially your learnings of determinism into such things, is a very most poisoning and unpractical classical theory..
But in that same frauenhofer and bunsen burner and gas electric dicsharge lamps, The precision of those lines and the Rydbergs constant to it, is some of the most precisely determined reality in science history, That is what comesn out at Laser accuracy in the same actually “unlinear” systems and opens the universal horizons to understanding. and co9nnects micro to macrochosmos and vice versa..
So make your choise allways on what you should better try and determine in your systems.
And we can take thousands of photos and microscopic measurements oif snow cristals. Not 2 of them will be equal and you can not from any cristal or group of cristals determine exactly for the next.
But make up your mind and ask a more intelligent question on what to determine, and youn will see that they all share that same 60 deg angle system and are more or less hexagonal stars, not heptagons or pentagons. That very consequent hexagonal nature can be determined and predicted for quite especially sure. And explained as well.
Thus we must think and scale and organize and do it all the way in everything. Enlitghted reasonable and possibly fruitful conscepts on what better to try and determine and what rather not try and explain and to determine.
Einstein and Niels Bohr once met each other. Both were jews and were like 2 roosters in the same basket, they did not allways agree and go well together. Einstein did hate Bohrs indeterminism and said: “God does not play with daise,..!”
Bohrs fameous answer to that: “Albert, never tell God what he should not do!”
Whether you find CHAOS or CHOSMOS in it mostly depends on whether you approach your system from the right side by adequate methods, or from the wrong side by inadequate methods..
If you only run into chaos and “unlinearity” that “cannot be determined… is not deterministic” then start from the bottom and from the beginning again and try it the other way around.
If you just run into thornhenges in your virtualo reality and even face Cherubs with flaming swords in it, then reallize that you may be trying and struggling in the damned forbidden direction.
Paul Pukite (@whut) at 10:42 PM
My initial comment here was in response to your comment where you stated that: Lorenz had an impact convincing some researchers that the Butterfly Effect made modeling pointless […] if the behaviors eventually spin into chaos, why waste time on finding patterns?
Now you say “The moon and sun should always be included in the system as they provide a forced response mechanism which is known to make even a potentially chaotic system deterministic.” as if arguing in favor of both sides of the issue. Are you? My point was that Lorenz did not show that modeling is pointless.
Regardless, I’ve already spent more Entropy on this discussion than I’d planned so I’ll live it at that. Regards.
“Tyson McGuffin” said:
” I’ve already spent more Entropy on this discussion than I’d planned so I’ll live it at that.”
That’s fine, as you don’t seem to be working the math anyways. I’ve made progress by ignoring the warnings of Lorenz. The tactic is to use the Navier-Stokes as is and don’t force them into a chaotic mode. Both sides, see? Cheers.
You seem to have a difficult time staying on topic which is simply that you erroneously said that Lorenz had an impact convincing some researchers that the Butterfly Effect made modeling pointless […] if the behaviors eventually spin into chaos, why waste time on finding patterns?
Take time to watch this video where:
“In this lecture Tim Palmer discusses Ed Lorenz the man and his work, and compares and contrasts the meaning of the “Butterfly Effect” as most people understand it today, and as Lorenz himself intended it to mean.
Tim Palmer is Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics at the University of Oxford.”
Tyson McGuffin said
You do realize it is easier for me if you just gave a published citation instead of forcing one to watch an hour long video.
“that makes the system nonlinear and non-linearity is the thing that allows energy to move up and down scales”
Which is what Hasselmann was saying before Lorenz.
So according to Palmer, Lorenz tried to prove that climate was not periodic by truncating Navier-Stokes equations. This was misguided. One needs to show that climate is NOT the result of an unknown (and perhaps complex) forcing.
“You do realize it is easier for me if you just gave a published citation instead of forcing one to watch an hour long video.”
I’m not forcing you to do anything. I am merely pointing out the folly of your original comment that “Lorenz had an impact convincing some researchers that the Butterfly Effect made modeling pointless […] if the behaviors eventually spin into chaos, why waste time on finding patterns?”
I note the fact that by admitting unfamiliarity with the paper behind Tim Palmer’s video you further confirm that your initial comment was misinformed. Regardless, the citation to the paper is as follows:
You are welcome by the way.
Tyson, You’re arguing by assertion, where I’m claiming the initial premise is invalid. There are many climate behaviors that are thought to be chaotic, but likely are not. Rather they are complex nonlinear with the limitation that we don’t have many useful tools for analysis. A good example of this is the El Nino Southern Oscillation, of which the consensus (perhaps wrong) thinking is that predictions are good for only a few months in advance.
This is the topic I’m currently working on and the reason I don’t apply the findings of Lorenz or Palmer is because they’re inapplicable for the approach I’m taking. The implication being that I never would have started down this route if I believed that ENSO was chaotic. That would have been hopeless for predictions for years or decades in advance..
Lots of nay’s, not many yay’s when one tries something outside of consensus.
Tyson, Should I read Lorenz if I was doing tidal analysis? No, because I make the initial premise that tidal cycles are not a chaotic behavior.
So start from there, add some non-linearity and see if one can capture other behaviors. Not everything has to be black&white chaotic versus non-chaotic. I think this is where the influence of Lorenz has lead researchers down the wrong path. You can argue with me over this, but I have presented at several AGU/EGU meetings and elsewhere published on applying a “less chaotic” analysis and have made progress IMO.
Good luck on your study of the ENSO subsystem; I’ll set a Google Scholar alert for any new research results when published. Until then I will continue to rely on Dr Anastasios Tsonis’s work on the subject.
A couple of references:
For those interested in the Lorenz topic:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-real-butterfly-effect.html
Interesting comments including one at the end from Tim Palmer.
On the Nobel winners:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/pioneering-climate-modelers-earn-nobel-prize-in-physics-20211005/
Carbomontanus 14 Nov 2021 at 2:58 PM
Maybe it’s the language barrier, but most of your comment is unintelligible to me. I think though, you are saying that whether a system behaves in a deterministic fashion is up to the experimenter and not a result of intrinsic characteristics of the system and/or its physico-mathematical definition.
In any event, I don’t think you are familiar with Sir James Lighthill’s September 1986 lecture to the Royal Society of London on “The recently recognized failure of predictability in Newtonian dynamics regarding deterministic vs. stochastic behavior in physical systems, and where he said:
Further;
Thanks for the insightful comments. Regards.
Hr. McGuffin
Your first paragrapyh seems supersticious.
…whether a system behaves in a deterministic fashion is up to the experimenter and not a result of intrinsic characteristic of the system….
A system should behave the way it does quite regardless of experimenters,
The intelligent experimenter knows how to disturb his systems least possible..
But whether experimenters find this or that, chosmos or chaos, Quite in order or just mess and disorder, depends a lot indeed on the observers behaviours and thoughts and how they aproach and treat the system because of what they think and believe that it is about, and whish to find out about it.
Finding more and more just only a mess is most often the result of silly brutal squeezing and forcing misconsceptions and false assumptions, methods, and theories onto it and expecting it to obey under that, which it does of course if you are brutal enough..
And because you learnt in school and in your studies that your given theories and rules are universal and are appliciable to anything, quite regardless.
( = classic, vulgar, dry material determinism and reductionism within “error- bars”)
When theories and methods, explainations and hypotetic parameters are carried outside of their definitional fields, they become less and less appliciable. And if you will not understand even that and better change your own mind instead, then you get into a mess., that has got less to do with the order and predictability of things, and more to do with the order and predictability of yourself.
In fact, you find and run tight into your own stupidity and ignorance. because you did set on it.
I could tell more about this from the side of chemistery and musical acoustics,
Neither is very “newtonian” in the vulgar deterministic sense, not dry material solid state classic mechanisms with linear elastic spiral springs and steel- hooks between the atoms making “stochastic” statistics within “error- bars”. That is simply a basically false model-conscept of matter, that was disqualified by science much earlier than in the sixties.
It will hardly rule for the pacific ocean either.
Hr.McGuffin
I looked further into your reference “Sir James Lighthills September 1986 lecture..”
That is very central and important, thank you.
I personally owe a lot to the Brahe and Keppler tradition and to the universities of Praha, Copenhagen and Christiania ( Oslo) The royal Frederiks. faculty of philosophy.
But it is a tradition what you mention and referre to there, and Lighthills ideas have been known to me since 1961 I can say through Niels Bohr and Piet Hein of Copenhagen, C.P. Snow and Bertrand Russel and Arthur Eddington from Cambridge.
“Nature and natures laws were hidden in darkness and night
God said Let Newton be and all was bright!”
(William Blake)
Determinism / indeterminism has been a central discussion of 20ieth century philosophy with extensions to political and religious thought, and creationism yes or no.. It even comes into genetics and basic evolutionary theory.
Darwins theory was basically Lamarcism and could not really take off without the further quantum mechanical possibilities given by Mendels beans and the Drosophilæ, . where God according to modern science actually plays with daise also.
But that has been very obvious in the garden all the time.
When God created the maple leaf, he thought geometrically, thus could allow himself quite a lot of artistic freedom in the practical performance also.
Proper pythagoreanism, CHAOS & CHOSMOS you see,….
Paul Pukite (@whut) at 11:16 AM
Tyson, Should I read Lorenz if I was doing tidal analysis? No, because I make the initial premise that tidal cycles are not a chaotic behavior.
So start from there, add some non-linearity and see if one can capture other behaviors. Not everything has to be black&white chaotic versus non-chaotic. I think this is where the influence of Lorenz has lead researchers down the wrong path. You can argue with me over this, but I have presented at several AGU/EGU meetings and elsewhere published on applying a “less chaotic” analysis and have made progress IMO.
I am now retired having spent almost 50 years engineering fluid dynamical systems, and all I can say is that personal opinions and assumptions therefrom don’t mean anything when modeling the behavior of natural systems. Academic exercises aside, predicting the effect of initial conditions on the long term behavior of a system is not a trivial task; if chaotic behavior is intrinsic I can’t just assume it away. I have to be able to realistically model the system’s performance over future time scales lasting several decades, all the while avoiding catastrophic failure and maximizing economic return. In the real world people get hurt if you over simplify the analysis.
McGuffin
So you are a plumber. Then we can discuss.
HR. McGuffin
This tells me a lot
We were in the boat repairing a 50 year old electrical system, My son is teacher of maths and science in school. His class scored extreemly high in juvenile ingenuity because he is son of his father.
I had a classical turning coil “multimeter” with me and we had a quite mysterious problem. The voltage was there but when we turned the switch, it did not work. The switch had been cecked and in order, the incadescent lamplight also in order.
We had a last chanse. I set one crocodile on the battery and gave him the other one with “a spear”. That is a tiny steel on isolating shaft, shaped and sharpened like a spear to pick into and through isolation and corrosion, paints and all.
“Set it there….” The volage was there. “And turn over the switch..” The voltage dropped to zero.
“Ohms law” I said “Ohms law, I say no more, Ohms law It rules in praxis!”
“Yes really? Ohms law rules in praxis… that I shall tell my pupils!”
It was the conductivity in old and corroded junction contacts. I even had the worst of all sometimes, when recycled and old electrical leads looking quite in order are broken under the intact isolation. Then have that tiny spear with another crocodile at hand.
So I wonder.
I hardly have more than public school on this, Ørsteds experiment of electromagnetism and Kirchoffs rule of branched cirquits and Ohms law, and need no more because it rules in praxis.
Your
“..all I can say is that personal opinions and assumptions therefrom (From plumbing?) don`t mean anything when modeling the behaviour of natural systems. Academic exercises aside…”
Surprises me really.
Because personally, I have had to take it out of nature the academic way for allmost everything ever since I was a small rascal and the adults could not or would not tell me because it was forbidden and they simply did not know.
Ørsteds experiment was pioneering science. Amperewindings around a closed magnetic cirquit of iron. is further Edisons and Teslas use of the same. Sulphuric or citric acid in a glass and a copper and a zink- plate = the Volta- experiment.. Ohms law , U= R., i, , effect is Volt- amperes, or the square of voltage through resistance or times conductivity. That gives heat.
This is nature, science, and academics all the way.
Bernoulli when it comes to aer0planes, propellars, and ship- shapes. . So I hardly have to ask the professionals. They are very proud and bold due to their professions anyway and unable to tell me.
They even measure and map it all in antsteps over all irrelevant surfaces and teach me gigabytes, statistics, and error- bars. But that does not work at sea or in the air or on electric networks or in the chemical glasses. It hardly works on earth and in the climate either.
I had to teach and to enlight the Dutch on my musical instruments what they are , how they work, and how to treat and understand them. And fight down that alternative surface- incremental antstep repetition theory with the secret varnish and with the professional production secrets inside under the surfaces in classic industrial space..
I took them on national level. J. van der Waals, I said, and Christiaan Huyghens`superposed and interfering wave patterns. Think frurter in terms of the Gouda, the windmills, and the wooden shoes that are finely derived from the shape of your feet IN SITU during walking, finely individually empirically by curved irons, else they will hurt. In the same way, the end- conditions must be finely adjusted and sculoptured to fit finely with the real waves, not vice versa because that will hurt you.
And think further in terms of the Grachts with steep, reflecting walls and a Dutch Plattboot mooving along inside there..
That was understood, since it was science and academics. Chladni Helmholz and Bjerknes`model theory of hydro and aerodynamics and Kepplers and Leonardos understanding of waves, streams, and harmonics. .
I derive my climate understanding from the Fig & Fig 8 &16 Manabe and Wetherald (1967)
that was discowered in 1905 by manned balloon and later repeated by the worlds fleet of weather balloons and long distance jet- liners. That isoterm- layer and convection- stop, the cool side of the globe that repeats also on Venus, and the dry adiabatic lapse- rate, the vertical convection limit. And have it the very easiest way from that science.
That very consequent knick in the lapsrate and the incredibly low temperature there in bright sunshine is to be given a true, natural explaination first. Before that, you are not qualified to discuss climate. And I learnt it from Theo Löbsack d/o.
The Royal Society disqualified the very Climategate and did teach:
“All we have to know is the content of CO2 in the aqtmosphere and some simple physics.”
The same is also my understanding.
I am able to resign mostly on the rest, probably because I had to derive my understanding of my existencial premises directly from Nature in order to avoid the expert professionals.
As a plumber you should see the same. What is inside of the tubes and the “Canaals” and what turns the windmills. How to make that reliable and responsible.
TYSON MCGUFFIN :
I find that statement quite odd. Does that mean one needs to be a licensed professional engineer to publish a finding? Should also remind everyone that controlled experiments are not possible for the earth sciences. The best model then is one that captures the observed behavior in the most parsimonious manner.
As I said before, good luck on your study of the ENSO subsystem, and your simplified approach. I am merely observing that you are proposing to model a system consisting of sea and air, that interact over broad scales of space and time by exchanging mass, energy and momentum over an intrinsically turbulent interface. All this without allowing chaotic behaviors at any scale. It sounds like a good academic exercise.
Simplified system — the ocean mass vs atmospheric mass is 269 to 1, so disregard the atmosphere for ENSO. Assumption — where is the turbulence? The standing wave modes of ENSO and related behaviors such as tropical instability waves are fixed in terms of wavelength.. What are they thinking?
“so disregard the atmosphere for ENSO”
So you are only studying half of the sub-system since El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a well known coupled ocean–atmosphere phenomenon, which manifests as a quasi-periodic fluctuation in sea-surface temperature (El Niño) and air pressure of the overlying atmosphere (Southern Oscillation) across the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
Here we have the thinker again.
Being quite aquainted to waves in molecular matter and also electromagnetic waves and quite especially superposed complex wave systems and standing wave functions and patterns, I can tell of quite sensitive and critical discontinuities, breakers rumble and burble and hysteresis.
269 to 1 is nothing near to the sensitivity yes or no for a tipping point with “breakers” and dramatic shift of module. That can be some of the very most sensitive of all physical systems.
Thus disqualify dilettants and Besserwissers on it first of all.
I once had to set the very library of physics on a certan subject back to where it belongs in the library dusts, rather by just a look at the oscilloscope. and was radically better aquainted to it from the side of modern updated physical chemistery and traditional modern radio technology and from sailing at sea.
It is rather a matter of being aquainted to possibly similar elements and examples model experiments in the lab and in nature, And able to often invent and to design the possibly phaenomenologically congruent methods of o0bservation and measurement.
I would guess that the pacific ocean is better done in the windtunnel and in the experimental ships- tank.
When C= lambda. ny does not rule in space, as it mosty does not and only assymptotically for absolute silence, then you have it.
AQ further very handy rule is to look for the letters C and even Psi. That entals, This article or textbook can be safely set back to where it belongs in the library dusts, And you loose nothing.
The cunninly chosen and mounted and mooveable online signal transducers and the cunningly mounted oscilloscope also to that, is dramatically more helpful.
Tyson said:
Is it a cause? Or is it a result of the ocean thermocline nearing the surface and thus releasing heat and thereby creating a pressure differential?
Same can be said for the wind. Is it a cause or is it a result of this same pressure differential?
Read this research article (which seems to be ignored) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49678-w
To all and everyone
What, I miss here, is a look into what was initially stated and mentioned, the Fig & fig 8 and 16 above.
As if you were alians to both brewery and baking, stirring into the very Pacific Ocean, that is the largest pot or barrel or heated liquid bassin in the world , not knowing how to describe it and to discuss it?
How do you expect to score your nobel prices if that is not taken serious first?
Permit and advice here:
“Seidr” comes out on both English and German Wikipedia.
Get aquainted to that first, I am.
That is about mixing and stirring in the large barrel brewery heating and cooling and waiting… in order to foresay the future in any kind of scientific way.
Those who were good at that, did score their nobel prices of chemistery.
Carbomontanus said:
An equivalent to that term is the idea of the “Just-So Story” which comes from Rudyard Kipling’s “How the Leopard Got His Spots”
Given the lack of a valid scientific model to explain some observed behavior or characteristic, any number of seemingly plausible explanations will be put forward.
That’s why applied math and applied physics is so important to understanding fundamental behaviors. Beware that people can easily be swayed by a ripping yarn, and the math and physics will protect against that.
Nobel prize physics lectures from the award winners here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YciGpe33WSc&t=2580s
Hasselmann: “could reject the null hypothesis according to which the observed moment could be explained by internal noise variations .. it’s then to be concluded that we have detected a signal emerging
from the sea of noise this is illustrated by a diagram from the 1990s”