Scientists have been responding to claims that if they were unable to predict the bad weather how can they predict climate change over the next century?
Scientists have been responding to claims that if they were unable, a few weeks ago, to accurately predict the severe weather that has hit Britain over the past few days, how are they able to accurately predict climate change over the course of the next century?
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Speaking on last night’s Newsnight, Dr Patrick McSharry, research scientist at the Smith School at Oxford University, explained that there is a “big difference” between short-term weather forecasts and long range climate forecasting. He said:
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“If you look at the actual scientific details of what’s been attempted to be calculated there is a huge difference. Before someone generates a forecast they have to validate the model, they have to make sure it adds up to being able to predict the historical events that have gone beforehand and if it’s able to do that then you have some confidence that it will actually work into the future.”
Keith Groves, Director of Operations at the Met Office, added that global warming can only have come from carbon dioxide:
“We do validate our climate models. To actually reproduce the change in temperature that we’ve seen in the last 100 years, the only way you can do that is by adding carbon dioxide into the model, so we have real confidence in the skill of our climate model to replicate the global climate as we move forward.
“That’s completely different to trying to forecast the variability on one month or two month or a season ahead. It’s a completely different application of the science.“
30 Responses to “Long range forecasting is accurate and CO2 does cause global warming”
hmmm
Incidentally, there is “evidence” of sorts if you look at the composition of the Fellowship of the Royal Society, for example.
It is easy to attack this as a purely sociological phenomenon, of course, given the way the FRS chooses new fellows – and I don’t make any great claim that it has a great deal of value – but it is nevertheless instructive to compare the proportion of climatologists amongst the FRS fellowship to the proportion of climatalogists amongst all those scientists receiving money from research councils.
hmmm
It’s a similar picture if you look at the composition of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, by the way.
Still, that evidence is fairly weak, I admit. Any evidence is likely to be weak because it is not possible to provide an objective measurement.
hmmm
Sorry, I forgot. Evidence isn’t valid without a link these days, it seems.
As an illustrative subsample, here are the new fellows of the Royal Society for 2009. These are scientists who other scientists rate highly.
http://royalsociety.org/New-Fellows/
I count 1 climate scientist (Professor Shine) amongst the 44 new Commonwealth members. I count at least 5 theoretical physicists – more if you count those working in condensed matter physics etc.
Anthony Zacharzewski
Scientists with years of training and access to highly advanced modelling software, combined with the resources of hundreds of universities and government research institutions, as well as mind-boggling amounts of data sourced by millions of hours of labour in the harshest and most inhospitable parts of the globe – what do they know?
I laughed out loud at the line about “the credit crunch shows that computer models aren’t up to much”. I think there might be a bit more to the credit crunch than computer modelling. We could start with misaligned personal incentives, herd instinct and greed.
What’s more – what does financial modelling have to do with climate modelling, other than that they both use computers? My toaster and my kettle both plug into the same electric socket, but for some reason the toast I make in my kettle always disappoints.
Oxford Kevin
Are these two of the societies that have put out statements in support of the climate scientists? Or are we talking about meteorologists?