Ed posted ---
Message 56668 - Posted: 10 Aug 2017, 9:04:22 UTC - in response to Message 56665.

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Message 56835 - Posted: 13 Sep 2017, 8:07:12 UTC

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[Paradox wrote:]... At the end of the day we all just need to hope for the best because we're incapable of doing what's best for ourselves collectively. ...

On that we are agreed.

I simply mean that we appear to be small people leading small lives. Though we are keenly aware of the weather we are unable to imagine the climate (i.e. the statistics of weather) and increasingly unwilling to acknowledge the authority of those who can. What we principally fail to understand, leading our social lives, is that the physical world cares nothing whatsoever for our vanities - in time our pursuit of wealth will be severely punished for our poverty of imagination.

In normal circumstances we small people might look to larger-scale institutions to address larger-scale, longer-term problems. But, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, those institutions seem populated by trivial people with small ideas - venal and comic. Our two countries are rightly laughing stocks around the world.

For myself, I've done as much as I can to mitigate climate change on a personal level, with some success, but long ago concluded that it is an intractable problem on a personal level - it just isn't possible to make a big enough difference even in aggregate. However, I can adapt to some extent, so I won't be investing in that coastal real estate development in Florida (even if I could) or building that house in a flood plain etc. etc. I participate in this project primarily because I think it is important to know how bad it's going to be.

[Paradox wrote:]... I guess you missed my point about 'weather' in relation to 'climate'. You seem to believe that, while weather prediction (which operates in the span of weeks) is one thing, yet those who predict changes in climate have it nailed. It's completely delusional but I get it. ...

Suppose you own a shoe shop and you commission Shoes R Us Consulting Inc to answer two questions:

(1) What selection of shoe sizes is required to supply all customers?

(2) What shoe size will be required by the next customer?

The consultants should be able to answer question (1) pretty accurately or they're not worth the money you're paying them; they might adjust the result according to the market served - fashion, workwear etc. To answer question (2) they would need to establish a network of sensors (such as CCTV cameras), real-time data processing (shoe size detection from images), maybe the doormat would provide a weight estimate, etc. etc. Question (1) is climate and question (2) is weather. So, yes, climate is in some ways relatively easier to predict than weather, though neither of them is easy.

The shoe on my foot is a shoe, whereas the distribution of possible shoes is indeed something else - in particular, it is not a shoe - you can't wear a statistical distribution. It is an enduring frustration how many climate change deniers fail to understand this fundamental point. [Edit: So your argument that not getting a hurricane 100% right means climate prediction is invalid amounts to saying that if the shoe shop cannot say what size shoe the next customer will require then it can say nothing about the range of shoe sizes it should stock for all customers. Of course it can say something about the distribution of shoe sizes even if it gets the next customer slightly wrong; the two concepts are related but different, just like weather and climate.]

PS Actually, I would really like to go to a shoe shop that had real-time predictive stock control - that whole thing where the staff member disappears into the back of the shop and then returns with the wrong size is downright annoying. You read it here first!

Greetings Paradox,
If you can come up with an experiment that would test the theory I am sure you could buy some time from Oxford University to have a batch or so of models sent out though from my albeit brief review of the freely available papers etc on the subject this one seems to be supported by the majority.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/cosmic-rays-and-global-warming-advanced.htm

Edit:
Also
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/henrik-svensmark

What theory does the 'majority' subscribe to? It seems to me there has been a rift in the fabric of conventional wisdom lately... and doctrine. A rift exposed and proliferated by leading scientists no less. Do you not see the writing on the wall? ...

Paradox, it has presumably escaped your notice that one of the authors of the recent paper is the person who started this climateprediction.net project, Myles Allen, so what we do here will be bang up-to-date with current climate science thinking.

There has been no "rift". Older analyses have been redone with newer data and the warming of the atmosphere differs by a small amount (the heat has been taken up by the oceans). Although CO2 is the principal influence on warming it has been known for a very long time that the warming only slowly responds to changes in CO2. So a small change in predicted warming provides a relatively large change in the short-term carbon budget (i.e. the 1.5C target rather than the longer-term 2C target): carbon budgets come with very large error bars.

So, you're going to be disappointed because nothing on the science side is going to change. The end point is exactly the same - the world is warming and it's a problem.

[Edit: CarbonBrief explains.]

"the heat has been taken up by the oceans"

as is evidenced by the increasing strength and frequency of this years hurricanes which are primarily driven by ocean temperature.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/first-snow-winter-falls-arctic-11173812

Having grown up in Scotland, I can assure you that is not an unusual occurrence at this time of year.[/url]

Edit:Here in Cambridge, the local paper has been predicting a severe winter for at least the past 8 years without getting it right. Statistically I they should get it right eventually!