What the hell is a climate model - and why does it matter?

MIT Technology Review ^ | February 8, 2018 | by James Temple

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Just a few years ago, the conventional wisdom held that you couldn’t attribute any single extreme weather event to climate change. But now scientists increasingly can and do state the odds that human actions caused or exacerbated specific droughts and hurricanes.

One big reason for the change is that the science of climate modeling is becoming increasingly powerful as improvements in technology, techniques, and data sharing allow researchers to set up novel experiments or simply run many more of them.

Climate models are sophisticated computer simulations that approximate how the planet responds to various forces, like surges in carbon dioxide. They break down the oceans, surface, and atmosphere into 3-D boxes and calculate how shifting conditions track across time and space.

Modeling advances have occurred as a result of a three-decade effort under the World Climate Research Programme, known as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). Under this program, research institutions are asked to conduct a common set of experiments with a common set of inputs, and publicly share the results.

The petabytes of resulting data have enabled researchers around the world to carry out studies that dive into specific areas of interest without having to secure their own time on supercomputers.

But for all these vast improvements, even a 25-square-kilometer box is still far too large to capture small-scale processes like the behavior of individual clouds. And scientists are well aware that the models don’t perfectly represent complex natural processes.

It’s why they generally speak in terms of ranges in climate-change scenarios, and why events in the real world can still occasionally occur outside those bounds.

[redfreedom]

The model you are displaying predicts some very hot weather.

[libertylover]

They’re lucky if they can predict a hurricane’s landfall location 100 hours out, much less 100 years.

[Red Badger]

There will be a rise, but not the sea level.....................

[wxgesr]

Warm fronts....

Lows suck, Highs blow

wxgesr

[pepsi_junkie]

It’s why they generally speak in terms of ranges in climate-change scenarios, and why events in the real world can still occasionally occur outside those bounds.

If by "occasionally" failing to predict real climate they mean "always" failing to predict real climate then yeah, that's what the models do.

[Bob]

All of those and unicorns too.

[jasonandtheb]

Climate models should be open source, complete with instructions on how to replicate results.

[Rebelbase]

Climate models, winter, spring, summer, fall.

[publius911]

“Garbage in, garbage out” applies.

Always has, always will.
The bar for calling models any sort of science is clear and high.

The gold standard for judging the validity of climate models to predict weather is simple:

If the model can accept instrument obtained input from weather, say 10 years ago, and compare the model provided weather from 20 years ago for the same period as the observed weather 10 years ago, the model is valid.

No known model to date has ever passed this simple test.

Any claim to the contrary involves fraudulent "massaging of the facts"

[Steve Van Doorn]

said, "Climate models cannot predict the formation and behavior of CLOUDS!"

To this day we don't know the particulates that creates the majority of Clouds. Without knowing the particulates we have no idea how the majority of clouds are formed.

Sounds like grade school information but we don't know.

[minnesota_bound]

What the hell is a climate model - and why does it matter?

It is made up lies in a make believe world.
Why does it matter? It will cost us a fortune while making the liars rich.

[minnesota_bound]

#13 You are ri....ght

[GingisK]

Yes, so it seems. A climate model would be a large piece of software written under a government contract to produce results that guarantee continued government funding. It does that by printing out numbers that can be interpreted to mean that climate is changing because we live on the planet, not because climate changes are cyclic.

I seem to recall that when I was in the sixth grade in the past millennium that we has just come out of an ice age. We were told to expect climate to slowly warm, and then slowly start to cool. Suddenly, that all changed due to that model mentioned above.

I trust that I sound skeptical.

[GingisK]

Heat is definitely generated in this case.

[Reily]

Basically unless you think he last glaciation (Ice Age) was truly the last there will be another glaciation as there always has been. It’s just a matter of how long until the next one! So are we entering another Ice Age? The answer is always yes, there’s always going to be another one. Unless something dramatic and unique changes the earth-sun-solar-planet- galactic system, nothing man made will ever do that!