gcm
illconsidered | May 5, 2014In the video below Gavin Schmidt gives a "TED Talk" on climate models, taking us from an overview of their construction to the resulting emergent processes and their skill at reproducing much more than a global average temperature trend.
Gavin is an excellent communicator and a true hero in humanity's fight against itself over the impending and tragic disruption of our global ecosystem services. Well worth the 12 or so minutes to watch!
illconsidered | December 20, 2013Filed under "Wow, this is cool!" we have a global real time wind map! (click the image)
The "About" page is here. Don't miss the fact that you can zoom in.
illconsidered | October 30, 2011The fallout from the BEST project results continues, with the denialosphere frantically trying to disown and defame Richard Muller. Marc Morano is at his shrillest pitch ever, and believe me that is as shrill as shrill gets! I guess it works at some level, because he did make me look at his website. That high pitched squeaking broke down all my intellectual safeguards and I followed a link from his almost daily inbox spamming.
Today's (approving) hysteria was about an article in the DailyMail which gives you the general flavour of the treatment Muller is receiving. Given his own rather…
stoat | February 10, 2011 Science (the mag, not the concept) sez:
Science is driven by data. New technologies... blah... publishers, including Science, have increasingly assumed more responsibility for ensuring that data are archived and available after publication... blah... Science's policy for some time has been that "all data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science" (see www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/)... blah... Science is extending our data access requirement listed above to include computer codes involved in the…
stoat | December 2, 2010SE has an excellent post about Validating Climate Models. It is all good, but I particularly liked
when we ask climate scientists for future projections, we're asking the question of the scientists, not of their models. The scientists will apply their judgement to select appropriate versions/configurations of the models to use, they will set up the runs, and they will interpret the results in the light of what is known about the models' strengths and weaknesses and about any gaps between the comptuational models and the current theoretical understanding. And they will add all sorts of caveats…
illconsidered | July 16, 2009
Lots of FUD about climate models get thrown around in the Climate Wars, but what is it they are really doing anyway?
The contrarians would have us believe they just take in a bunch of contrived parameters and spit out the worst case possible scenario for global average temperature increase. But the truth is the kinds of models the IPCC report on are very complex and nuanced.
Since I'm no expert and pictures are worth thousands of words, I would like to offer a few beautiful video realizations of GCM output.
The first is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) CCSM climate…
illconsidered | July 7, 2009Marc Morono (sick) breathlessly announces that Gavin Schmidt has finally admitted that weather is chaotic and GCMs can not model it.
And yes, that is about as shocking an admission as water is wet.
Here is the incriminating quote:
"The problem with climate prediction and projections going out to 2030 and 2050 is that we don't anticipate that they can be tested in the way you can test a weather forecast. It takes about 20 years to evaluate because there is so much unforced variability in the system which we can't predict -- the chaotic component of the climate system -- which is not…