Re: Storm surge in Boston
Whigh, are you a science denier? Do you feel that all published studies are corrupt and opportunistic, and that the business world is somehow not corrupt nor opportunistic? There is a lot of corruption in science, and an awful lot of corruption in business.
So if you don't trust science, then I suggest you check with the insurance companies (private sector) and ask them whether they think there is a storm surge risk in boston.
Just do us all a favor, and check with them before you repost denialist views on this forum.
BigPicture – I was going to respond in a flippant way to your ignorant ad hominem attack. However, I thought about it abit more and decided that this needs a careful response as the amount of misinformation about the study of the climate and predictions is getting out of hand.
So let me begin by providing a bit of my background. As opposed to most people posting on this and many other fora -- I actually have done and occasionally still do science. My core expertise is experimental physics -- but I have investigated in many fields including some related to meteorological observation. In point of fact some decades ago when issues involving the climate where buried in obscurity I did do some work with the National Climatological Database and investigated sources of error in the marine buoy temperature data sets. That investigation actually was the trigger to my interest in climate issues and in particular the dynamics of the climate.
The basic problem with your comment is that you make the common misconception that all science is the same kind of science. There is a significant difference between true experimental science, and science where you cannot control the experimental conditions.
In the former – you begin with a hypothesis as to what might happen. Perhaps the hypothesis is based on the application of a well-known theoretical concept – perhaps its just a guess on your part. Then you carefully design the experiment to test the hypothesis. if the experiment seems to produce anomalous results -- you repeat it – perhaps by improving the experimental apparatus or the procedure. In the latter case – you sit back and collect your data and just hope that nature throws you a similar set of conditions a second time.
However, even with really carefully designed lab experiments we sometimes get strange results that persist for a while -- e.g' "Neutrinos moving supra-light" -- I actually called this one when I mentioned that it was probably a bad cable. In all cases, if we are really doing science, we publish our experimental information and challenge someone else to invalidate or improve on it.
That's why experimental science often involves revisiting an old experiment with newer experimental tools. This approach was part of my dissertation, as I was able to use computer data acquisition to redo in days what a Russian Physicist using 35 mm cameras and traditional oscilloscopes took years to achieve. He had to develop the film and then find out that he’s missed some important aspect. I just had to twiddle something and fire the experiment again and then I could process the data in near real-time.
Improving instrumentation, or data acquisition procedure, is an insurmountable obstacle for one-time observational science. Note that this applies to infrequently recurring observational science as well. So for example someone trying to observe Halley's Comet has to wait 75 years to try again -- but at least it will be back. The Blizzard of 1978 -- is one and done -- there might be other blizzards in February, but other things will not be the same.
In terms of assessing the climate, we might want that the very limited sites collecting temperature data in the early 1800's were being precise and accurate [there is a serious distinction between these two] -- but it just wasn't that way. Similarly we might wish that there were any significant sources of temperature data in the Southern Hemisphere before the mid 20th Century -- but there weren't. We might wish that the stations collecting local climate data for farmers were located and maintained so that the data could be used 100 years later to try to understand global phenomena – but they weren’t. We only have a few years of good Satellite data before the big el Nino of 1998. Our regular observational CO2 data started with the IGY in the mid 1950's. None of these can be remedied by anything which we do today or forward.
On top of these kinds of issues with looking at the temperature record – at least it is there for all to see and deal with as they wish. On the other hand -- "predictive climate science" is based purely on comparing computer models to other computer models. Similarly to the comparison with experimental science [coupled with an underlying theoretical basis] and purely observational science, there is nothing which can be characterized as a true computer model experiments.
In a computer model you must include all of the science in your [atomic view] which in a typical Climate Model might be several hundred cubic kilometers. Once you understand what is happening in the minimum volume and minimum time step – it can be iterated to your heart’s desire. However, if you omit or get something wrong in that micro view -- running more cycles, or creating finer grids of points will not improve your outcome.
So the people doing the models admit that they don’t know what the critical parameters involved are and how they might be changing. Their response is to try to estimate the “sensitivity” of the output to some parameter. These sensitivity estimates have had their own dynamic over the history of the IPCC reports. One would hope that over time the “error bars” would decrease, and some have, but not all. The net result is that If you believe in “science” -- then you cannot say that the “Science is settled.”
There are challenges out there for the modelers to run their best models using old data to see if they can recreate recent observations -- there are no takers.
Now to be flippant a bit – The above is why people say things like "it’s not Rocket Science" or "it’s not Nuclear Physics" -- I've never heard someone using the put-down "It’s not Climate Science."
