Josh at the Royal

Josh has been at the Royal Society's conference on uncertainty in weather and climate prediction. His visual notes can be seen here.

Update on Oct 6, 2012 by Josh

The second day's notes have now been added and all the notes can be seen here.

www.cartoonsbyjosh.com

Update on Oct 8, 2012 by Josh

Most of the talks are online here on event home page - just click the name of the speaker, at the bottom of the page, to hear the talk.

Comments

[John Shade]

Yup. Well done Josh for sitting through it and reporting back. Evocative - that's the word!

[Green Sand]

Thanks Josh

Feels as though I have actually been there!

[omnologos]

I'm none the wiser. Perhaps I'm a world-class Uncertainty Expert already!!

[cui bono]

Abfab Josh!
Some kindly soul should be your patron and send you to the next UN global climate junket - bet that would be hilarious.

[TinyCO2]

Sounds a bit like they were admitting that they’re crap at forecasting.

They fret about the public not understanding probability or in their terms uncertainty. To them a rainfall prediction of 33% wetter than normal, 33% drier than normal and 33% normal precipitation is reasonable. To the layman it translates as ‘they haven’t got a clue’.

The Met Office feel justified in having predicted a cold winter by recording a 20% chance of a colder than average winter in their forecast. The kicker comes when you add up repeated predictions where the minority prediction becomes the right prediction. To demonstrate skill you have to get better results than if you averaged the last five years and used it as your prediction. I suspect they’re well over par.

[Josh]

It was a fascinating two day conference, the cartoons only hint at the content - I will find the links to the talks (and add the second days's cartoons) so you can get the full uncertainty. You won't be disappointed.

Tiny, wish you had been there. I am sure you could have asked some very helpful questions ;-)

[omnologos]

How much do we need to send Josh to Doha? I would surely contribute!!

[TinyCO2]

Is does look like it was a very honest and interesting event! I'd have loved to be there, thanks for bringing it to us.

Despite my sourness towards modellers and climate scientists, I actually have a lot of sympathy for them. They’re attempting to model something that might be impossible to model. I quickly lose patience with them however for choosing such hard and fast values for forcings and assuming that they’re right. They act like bad psychics who decide to go public to demonstrate their skill and are clearly shown to be frauds. More annoying still they’re learning to be good psychics by not coming out with anything testable. By the time you realise you’ve been conned the shyster has moved beyond the reach of retribution. Hence the latest claim that models can’t be accurate for timeframes under 30 years. How… convenient.

I don’t know if it’s being done but it would be interesting to see if fuzzy logic could make more sense of climate than conventional computing. The problem would be that most of the things that might affect climate are so poorly measured that there’s not enough data to draw any conclusions. That might highlight how little we know about climate and how important it is that the temperature records are not just ‘ok’ but ‘near perfect’.

If the climate is mainly the result of a few key variables then the small stuff wouldn’t matter but by that measure the models we have now should be accurate. If on the other hand the climate is the result of hundreds or thousands of tiny perturbations then without disentangling the noise, you can’t determine the trend.

Instead of them worrying about how to deal with uncertainty, they need to worry about how to deal with credibility. I could issue a prediction that in a 100 years global temperatures will be between −273.15°C and +5505 °C with an accuracy of 100% but it wouldn’t be very helpful. It wouldn’t make me a climate scientist.

Contrary to their opinion, and possibly even bags full of complaint letters, the public don’t expect them to be that accurate. Most adults realise that climate and weather are complicated and would expect a fair degree of uncertainty. However, when you set yourself and your field up as having consensus, you are expected to demonstrate significant ability. If you make the grandiose claim that you know what the global temperature will be 100 years into the future, being wrong for the first 10+ years doesn’t inspire confidence.

It’s time all those credible scientists, we never hear from, said ‘enough’s enough. Mann, Trenberth, Hansen, Gleick, Jones, Gore, Ward, Revkin, Prince Charles, Greepeace, WWF, etc’ do not speak for us. We are not the Oracle at Delphi. Climate is bloody complicated and we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface. We need to take loads more measurements and see what a change in the Atlantic Oscillation does to the climate. All that stuff about cosmic rays needs looking into. We’ll get back to you. In the mean time keep working on new energy sources because you’re going to need them and invest in efficiency, ‘cause it always pays off.’

[Josh]

Tiny, completely spot on. Sounds like you were there after all.

One thing that struck me there was the wafer thin gap between sceptics and scientists compared to the gulf there is in the more public alarmist vs sceptic debate. In other words the actual scientists don't seem to be saying much that supports the alarmist cause.

Hopefully my interpretation will be backed up by the talks when they are available. You can get Judith Currry's talk in outline already here . Well worth reading and a good summary of the conference.

[TinyCO2]

All those models built on the outputs of climate models– puts me in mind of the Flea poem.

The Climate Siphonaptera

Big models have little models,
Upon their backs they cite them,
And little models have lesser models,
and so, ad infinitum.

SHOE SHOP KEEPER What does this forecast mean in terms of winter weather?

WEATHER FORECASTER Well, you have to understand uncertainty. 66% likely it will be wetter than normal. 33% it will be drier than normal or normal. 47% Colder, 47% as warm as normal or above, 5% very cold.

SHOE SHOP KEEPER What’s with the missing percentages?

WEATHER FORECASTER Err, there’s always the possibility of extremes.

SHOE SHOP KEEPER To me that means I should buy 66 pairs of wellies, 15 pairs of shoes, 15 sets of boots, 3 snow shoes and a small dinghy. Is that right?

WEATHER FORECASTER I’m not an expert on shoes.

SHOE SHOP KEEPER And on weather?

WEATHER FORECASTER Umm, do you have a dinghy in my size?

[John Shade]

Quote from Josh "One thing that struck me there was the wafer thin gap between sceptics and scientists compared to the gulf there is in the more public alarmist vs sceptic debate. In other words the actual scientists don't seem to be saying much that supports the alarmist cause. "

This observation is very important. A veritable machine exists to trumpet alarming interpretations of scientific results or speculations, including some from explicitly alarmed scientists themselves such as Hansen. But calmer voices face a more uphill task in getting heard. Fortunately, they seem to be making progress. On a terminological note, your phrase hints that 'sceptics' and 'scientists' are distinct categories, although it is clear to the most casual student of your work that you know this is not the case and that the two categories overlap, as do the categories 'alarmist' and 'scientist'. I have a hunch (perhaps no more than wishful thinking!) that the overlap would be found to be dramatically less in the latter case. If only a properly composed and conducted survey could be made to help decide!

[Josh]

John, yes, agreed. There is little or no distinction between scientists and sceptics. In fact one of the scientists at the conference said "all scientists are sceptics".

I was inspired by many of the speakers, particularly those involved in humanitarian work, and heard little that would offer encouragement to, say, a Guardian journalist and who as far as I could tell were not represented there.

Someone from Carbon Brief was there and I left a comment on their blog but it got snipped. So I tried again and for posterity here it is:

Oh dear! My comment got snipped! I read the comments policy page and realised that by linking to my site I might well have fallen foul of the policy. So I will try again, without the link.

I too was at the conference and came away with a distinctly different impression from the article above - and as can be seen in my cartoon notes which you can find via my site or on the BishopHill blog.

I can probably summarise it best by one of the conversations I had with a climate modeller at the meeting. He said linking climate change to climate impacts was a step too far.

So yes, he was confident in the basic science, and confident that the effect is real. But how much and when is uncertain. And not just a wee bit uncertain, but mind bogglingly unquantifiably zero-data uncertain.

Hopefully the talks will be online soon and you will be able to judge for yourself.

In the mean time, I would suggest to John Marshall, above, that climate change might well be like falling off a cliff, but the cliff might be two inches high and we might all be wearing fat suits. We just don't know. The science does not back up your statement "it's damn well going to hurt", at least not the science I heard at the Royal Society conference.

[Orson]

the link concluding "all the notes can be seen here." HERE is now empty.