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The settled uncertainty

15 Jan 2025 | OP ED Watch

Over at The Atlantic they almost do some good climate journalism in an item by Zoë Schlanger, even though she “covers climate change” for them rather than, say, science or climate or something less tendentious. Her piece bears the headline “Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth”, which if true is surely big news, given how much the scientists who say and the politicians who say they say rely on them both for pseudo-data and as a rhetorical club. Especially if it turns out the scientists themselves are seeing a problem, admitting it, and trying to fix it in a spirit of open inquiry. Alas, the subhed reads “Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on.” Which makes you wonder what the worst are up to… and what makes these “the best” if they’re meant to model the world and flub it. #onejob, we sneer.

The piece has the usual tone of dogmatic uncertainty:

“Fifty years into the project of modeling Earth’s future climate, we still don’t really know what’s coming. Some places are warming with more ferocity than expected. Extreme events are taking scientists by surprise. Right now, as the bald reality of climate change bears down on human life, scientists are seeing more clearly the limits of our ability to predict the exact future we face. The coming decades may be far worse, and far weirder, than the best models anticipated.”

Yeah. They may be. Unless they’re not. But they do!!! They must!!! See, “Today’s climate models very accurately describe the broad strokes of Earth’s future.” Um how would you know such a thing if that future hasn’t arrived yet? What are you testing their predictions against? A cli-fi novel?

Not the evidence. Listing things they muffed, even in the very short run, she includes:

“And a global jump in temperature that lasted from mid-2023 to this past June remains largely unexplained, a fact that troubles Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, although it doesn’t entirely surprise him. ‘From the 1970s on, people have understood that all models are wrong,’ he told me. ‘But we’ve been working to make them more useful.’”

Yeah. And we’ve been working to grow taller, younger and better looking. Not quite there yet. If Gavin Schmidt has known throughout his career that the models are wrong, we feel that he has been less than forthright about it. But alas, we lack his excuse:

“That scientists don’t have those answers might look like a failure of modeling, but really, it’s a testament to how bad climate change has been permitted to get, and how quickly.”

Got it? The models are not just right despite being wrong. They’re wrong because they’re right. Uh, sweep up the bits of this crystal ball, willya? Otherwise someone’s gonna cut their brain or something.

She almost gets to a point of clarity several times. Including that:

“The Earth is an unfathomably complex place, a nesting doll of systems within systems. Feedback loops among temperature, land, air, and water are made even more complicated by the fact that every place on Earth is a little different. Natural variability and human-driven warming further alter the rules that govern each of those fundamental interactions.”

Meaning it’s non-linear and transcomputable and even if you had that fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide computer the size of a planet it couldn’t work it out? If so it matters. If not, why not? She sidles out without saying. But even on a less cosmic scale, she tiptoes into the forbidden field of the climate modeling computers being inherently unable to model climate. For instance:

“Some of these systems – such as cloud formation – are notoriously poorly understood, despite having a major bearing on climate change. And, like clouds, many parts of the Earth system are just too localized for climate models to pick up on.”

So they’re so far out to lunch you might get dinner? Or miss breakfast? After all:

“Models simply can’t function on the scale at which people live, because assessing the impact of current emissions on the future world requires hundreds of years of simulations.”

So it’s totally useless, even an imposture? Cicero often told a story of Cato the Elder, in most respects a militant defender of Roman traditions including spiritual, saying he could not understand how two “haruspices” or fortune-tellers could pass in the street without smirking at one another. Should the same not be said of our climate modelers?

No, no. They have it all under control. It’s just that:

“For nonscientists, coaxing useful information from climate models requires professional help.”

Either that or, for journalists, believing you can do it requires professional help. Just of a different sort. Especially if they write a whole piece on how climate models are less useful than a chocolate teapot, which one could at least eat in a crisis, then end it:

“We’re left instead with a partial picture, gestural in its scope, pointing toward a world we’ve never seen before.”

Forgive a comeback gestural in its scope as we wave this verbiage away as a screen for the fact that the models have no idea what’s coming and aren’t about to get one, and they’ve been deceiving themselves and then us and can’t bring themselves to admit it. So we’ll do it for them, as our own particular form of professional help.

5 comments on “The settled uncertainty”

  1. I enjoy your erudition so perhaps you can enlighten me about Cato's soothsayers' smirks. Were they a shared nod and wink signalling both knew that what they were up to was entirely bogus, or was it that each regard his soothing as more accurate than the other's.

  2. The unexplained 2023 temperature jump? Climate modellers rely on feedback loops based on increased water vapour in the atmosphere, yet make no connection between 2023 temperatures and the 10% increase in high altitude water vapour due to the Hunga Tunga volcano in 2022.

  3. Professional climate forecasters necessarily require to be able to predict gloom and doom at all times.: 'hottest year ever - it's worse than we thought - threats to human civilization' - gets you lots of funding for next year. How much funding would do you think you would get if you simply said, 'nah, not a real problem, nothing to worry about' ?

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