Unsettled Science: The Alarmists Want More Money (nope, time’s up)

The about face (really mid-course correction) of US policy toward the out-of-control Climate Science Complex is front-page news. Such could not be more timely (although decades late). The 25,000 registration for the American Geophysical Society meeting in Washington, DC several months ago indicated a self-perpetuating government industry at work.

But what about the plea that we don’t know what is going on with global climate and need for resources? Such was the plea of Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather in a New York Times editorial several months ago, “We Study Climate Change. We Can’t Explain What We’re Seeing” (Nov. 13, 2024). Their intention was to alarm by insinuating: we don’t know what is happening, and it must be ‘climate change’ run amuck. Global weirding. Name your term.

But another view is that yes, climate science is unsettled. Its practitioners do not know what they don’t know. No basis for climate policy except for the Deep Ecologists who dread all things anthropogenic.

“Yet the unusual jump in global temperatures starting in mid-2023 appears to be higher than our models predicted (even as they generally remain within the expected range,” the article begins.

While there have been many partial hypotheses — new low-sulfur fuel standards for marine shipping, a volcanic eruption in 2022, lower Chinese aerosol emissions and El Niño perhaps behaving differently than in the recent past — we remain far from a consensus explanation even more than a year after we first noticed the anomalies. And that makes us uneasy.

Some humility perhaps? Nope, just a call for more money.

Why is it taking so long for climate scientists to grapple with these questions? It turns out that we do not have systems in place to explore the significance of shorter-term phenomena in the climate in anything approaching real time. But we need them badly. It’s now time for government science agencies to provide more timely updates in response to the rapid changes in the climate.

“climate science research is more used to working on approximately seven-year cycles to produce reports that summarize the evolving science about the long-term changes in climate. The data that went into the latest round of climate model simulations are based on observations that only run through 2014, and so they don’t reflect recent changes such as newer pollution controls, volcanic eruptions or even the effects of Covid. Similarly, the forecasts are stuck with scenarios that were common in the early 2000s. Business (and everything else) has changed sharply since then.”

As a result of all of this, a gap has opened up between what the general public and policymakers want and what is available.

To fix this, we need to create a better way for climate models to reflect new observations. That means more comprehensive and faster data gathering from satellites, in situ measurements and economic statistics, converted by analysts for the climate and weather models. This needs to be matched by a commitment by the roughly 30 labs around the world that maintain the models of the earth’s climate system to update their simulations each year to reflect the latest data.

Some of the information that goes into climate models currently takes years to produce. For instance, while data on greenhouse gas levels and energy from the sun are available within weeks of observations’ being taken, emissions of industrial and agricultural air pollutants need to be estimated from economic data, and this can take years to collect and process.

Scientists should be able to provide “good enough” estimates of these inputs faster using reasonable assumptions. Just as economic analysts frequently update statistics after an initial announcement, such as a quarterly jobs report, scientists could provide data for industrial emissions of pollutants, the activity of the sun, the impacts of volcanoes and greenhouse gas levels on two or more tracks — an initial estimate using as much data as is available quickly, and a fully revised estimate later once more data is in.

We think that a goal of analyzing data in under six months is achievable if the data-gathering and climate-modeling labs prioritize it. This entails a small shift by tU.S. agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy, and international agencies such as Copernicus, the European climate service provider, toward sustained funding instead of one-off research grants.

Other groups, such as weather forecasters, would also be able to take advantage of this new data stream. When they’re doing seasonal or longer-term forecasts, they are also not working from the most up-to-date information and would be able to use this to improve the forecasts.

“The public would benefit from more definitive knowledge on what is going on, too. Water-resource managers and urban planners could be more confident that they are using the most current scenarios and projections, helping them avoid underestimating or over-preparing for future change. If climate projections were better calibrated to recent changes, we could narrow the likely range of future impacts.

Some of the unease that people feel about climate change comes from a sense that things are out of our control — that the climate is changing faster than we can adapt. However, many of the most dire risks lie not with the most likely outcomes but the worst-case possibilities, for example, the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, or the drying up of the Amazon and other potential tipping points. But there is a lot we don’t know about if or when those tipping points will come to pass.

The good news is that climate science could easily become more agile in understanding the rapid changes we are seeing in the real world, incorporating them into our projections of the future and, hopefully, reducing that uncertainty.

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Source: https://www.masterresource.org/climate-science/unsettled-climate-science/