Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 11:17:16 AM
You'll excuse me if this segues into a climate change diatribe, but they are part and parcel of the same problem.
Hurricane Irene tore into the entire Eastern Seaboard last weekend. I was spared from it's wrath, but many others still have more water and less electricity than desired. As a political side note, the infrastructure repair in all these localities is not a FEMA responsibility and everybody knows it, so Obama will not fall further into the hole for this- but he will still suffer the effects of the expectations he raised in 2008. This is what happened to him when the BP oil covered the Gulf and he could do little but watch.
Anyway, the story here is that Irene's path was because of a couple of factors. The two biggies are a Meridian jet stream (north to south, not along the equator) that failed to push the storm out to sea sooner and Atlantic waters so warm that they provided fuel to feed the beast. These are both established patterns and are cyclical. They are established within a reasonable margin of error by accurate and plentiful measurements. This means that it is likelier than any year since 1954 that a few other storms in the season will follow a similar path, and we should all prepare.
The Hurricane Center also tries to add forecasts of storm origin. This is not cyclical but predictive, which carries a greater error margin by definition. Added to this is the fact that their computer models involve large parts of the Atlantic. They model RCM's (regional climate models) in rectangular grids, which they then stitch together into a GCM (general climate model). They will tell you that it is more accurate now because the greater processing power allows them to model each grid with 20+ thermal layers instead of the classic three. The problem? G.I.G.O. Garbage in, garbage out.
The Gulf Stream is littered with sensor buoys, because it is properly regarded as a harbinger of North American climate prediction. The rest of the Atlantic is not. The closest thing we have to consistent mid-ocean measurement (outside of the limited scope of satellite readings) is the submarine sonar nets set up by ourselves and the Soviets in the Cold War. The Navy knows that thermal layers are not predictable and do not bother with temp readings there. This all means that the Mister Wizard meteorologists have to provide their own information to the computer models based on their prognosticative skills.
That is why the predictions of storm origin and frequency before they happen is so happenstance, while the path of established hurricanes can follow a predictive conical path. It's all about the margin of error. The better error analysis with the path compared to origin is because of the more realistic information that it is based on.
Which brings us back to climate change. The continuing explosion of computer processing power we have experienced in our lifetimes seems to have brought many scientists into a romantic haze with being able to model the Troposphere better, because they are feeding more information into it, without bothering to address what the information is based on. A RCM grid in the middle of the ocean today is based on information not much better than what was available in 1970.
On top of that, the coreolis effect of the weather patterns intermingles so many grids so quickly that the information changes around you while you work on your model. This is why air traffic controllers can get such accurate weather reports for airports and TRACON paths- they are based on small areas in real time. Predicting metropolitan areas for even three days out involves a much greater margin of error.
If you have a margin of error like that for a weather report for a state wide area, where the hell do you get off developing conclusions of Al Gore certainty for the planet? By the way, non-believers to Gore's preachings are now not only "flat earthers", but "racists".
I am a climate change skeptic. I don't think it is not happening, I just do not see the scientific process being followed in it's classic form to reach these "established" conclusions. I do not see how this is all "established science". And from that, I certainly do not see changing energy policy and spending my tax money to "fix" it.
Environmental science is not science right now. The more likely it is being presented to me as "fact", the more likely I am to be witnessing motivational and appeal to authority arguments, political arguments and (worst of all) scientific "consensus" arguments. This group of scientists agrees that it is happening, so I must? Screw that.
Address the margins of error. Show me a computer model that can predict the weather accurately enough to convince me that you have a working analysis of the northern hemisphere. Tell me where you are getting your information from.
Absent that, keep working on it and stay the hell out of government policy.