[lug] Anyone else hate to get rid of old equipment?

[dio2002 at indra.com]

>> How do you test AGW?  Everything is caused by it:  Droughts, floods,
>> extreme cold, extreme warmth, tornadoes, hurricanes, lack of tornadoes,
>> lack of hurricanes.
>
> You confound weather with climate.

nice post! thanks

> Droughts, floods, extreme cold, extreme warmth, tornadoes, hurricanes,
> lack of tornadoes, lack of hurricanes are weather. Weather is
> unpredictable after a few days. Let me repeat that: there isn't any
> chance you can foresee weather for a period longer than "something" (I
> don't remember the actual theoretical limit, but let's say a few
> months). It's also very local: you might even seen a block severely
> damaged by hail and the next one intact.
>
> Climate, on the other hand, "works" on larger scales (spatial and
> temporal). You can say that climate is the spatial and temporal
> average under big enough spatial and temporal domains. It is very
> predictable.
>
> Now, if the climate (=average) changes, the individual items that
> create that average (=weather) must change too. But you cannot state
> that "this hurricane has been caused by climate change", as much as
> you cannot say if the deck is stacked just drawing a single card. You
> need quite a lot of statistics to be sure. And still a fair amount
> even to suspect it.
>
> So, to answer your question "how do we test climate change"? The
> answer is: with computer models of the atmosphere. Note that these are
> climate models, completely different from the weather models used for
> the forecast. The weather forecast is trying to look at the croupier,
> and how he shuffles the deck to predict the next card. If the croupier
> is fast enough or if he shuffles long enough the forecast is
> impossible. The climate model tells you that on average the house will
> make money, on the long run. Climate is easy, weather is hard. I'm
> sure you understand this well.
>
> The climate models that we have predict very well the current and past
> status of the climate, if we use everything that we know, including
> but not limited to human greenhouse emissions, volcanoes, ground
> reflectivity, (yes, ice reflects solar heat much more effectively than
> water), etc.
> Leaving out just one of these factors (e.g. volcanoes, or human
> greenhouse emissions) would cause the model to predict a current
> climate different from what we measure. As I said in my other email,
> different enough not being explainable by measurements errors.
>
> Thus we say that human greenhouse emissions are already causing
> "measurable climate change" (difference from model runs with or
> without them - which are larger than measurement inaccuracies).
>
> Would you like to disproof this finding? Write your own model (or
> modify an existing one, they're open source), using sound physics,
> chemistry or even biology if you'd like to include vegetation growth
> (yes, some models already do that - and it's not enough to "correct"
> the CO2 that we pump into the atmosphere). Have your model able to
> accurately predict the past and current, measured, status of the
> climate. Have your model predict the same results (within the accuracy
> of the measurements and of the computation) with or without the human
> greenhouse emissions.
>
> I'll stop here on this thread.
> Bye,
> ;Dav
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