Last week, I had an idea for a blog series that would do two things. It would allow my head to empty some thoughts on this virtual journal I call a blog and it would also hopefully spill out some useful content for you, the reader. Problem is, a mistress named Irene has taken over my life for the past week. Finally, I have broken up with Irene, leaving more than enough time to climb back into the blogger's seat.
You see, along with being the Head of Meteorological Operations here at Weather Underground, I also teach an introductory Weather & Climate at a local college. In the class, I spend an entire semester teaching generally freshmen and sophomores the very first baby steps about the atmosphere and weather. Throughout the semester, I am amazed that some of my students do not know terms that are first-hand to me. These could be easy terms such as latitude and longitude but also more complex issues like cold fronts and temperature inversions.
While I was initially amazed that students could come into a place of higher learning without some of this knowledge (my error), I have recently come to an interesting conclusion. I quickly realized that they aren't scientist to begin with and I thus translated this lack of public knowledge on basic scientific ideas to the ever hyped theory of climate change.
Most of the general public gets a vast majority of their climate change information from the mainstream media. This could be in the form of the latest scientific study, news of the most recent ice sheet breaking off into the open ocean, or coverage of the minority of climate scientists who believe human-based climate change is not real or a hoax. This is where the problem lies. Journalists have an obligation to tell both sides of every story. EVERY STORY. While this may be a great paradigm for nearly every story out there, it is not ideal for the theory of human-based climate change. This is because by telling both sides of the climate change story, journalists are giving the 3% of legitimate climate change scientists who believe humans are not changing our climate an over-sized chunk of their entitled 50% of the journalist's pages. Thus, the remaining 97% of climate scientists are left scrambling for the other 50% of media space. This is clearly lop-sided. This would be the equivalent of giving the only 3 dissenters in a 100 person city hall meeting 50% of the discussion time. It is simply unfair.
Now, let's look at it from the general public's side. Keep in mind that the majority of the general public are not experts on complex ideas of the carbon cycle or even simplier ideas such as Earth's seasons. The public will consume these mass media climate change articles and studies, half of which say they have to make dramatic changes in their lifestyles for the good of the planet, and the other half saying that the life they are living is perfectly fine and climate change is naturally blissful.
From that point of view, the reason for the heated debate currently being argued at countless Saturday night parties is clear. Why would the general public flock toward the human-based climate change side, when they see that half of the data they get is telling them that their lives are perfect? Nobody wants to change their comfortable life, do they? It defies logic.
Thus, I have a solution to this entire problem. I am eliminating the mass media by making you all experts in the atmosphere and the air you breathe. By making you experts, you take away the part of the equation that allows you to digest bad science from minority climate change skeptics. Then, you will have no need to consume mass media articles since you will be able to tell right from wrong yourself. Sound good? I thought so. But, I can't start in the middle. For everybody's sake, I have to start at the beginning. Baby steps.
Thus, this blog series is aimed at making you an expert by making you a meteorologist. Don't worry, we will start gentle before getting into more complex issues. But first, we have to learn what the heck is the difference between weather and climate anyway?
Lesson 1: The Earth's Atmosphere
What is weather?
Easy enough question, right? Sure, until I hit you with another...What is climate? Are they the same? Not really. Actually, not at all.
Weather is defined as the condition of the atmosphere at any given time.
Let me give you some examples. If I say, "The temperature outside is 86 degrees", that is a statement of weather. It describes what the temperatures is outside at a particular time. You can describe past weather events as well as such, "Remember when we went to that baseball game and it poured on us?" Again, describing a component of the atmosphere at a particular time. There are numerous parameters you can use to describe weather.
-Air temperature
-Air pressure
-Humidity
-Clouds
-Precipitation
-Visibility
-Wind
-Many more
So, what is climate?
Quite simply, climate is the study of weather over a long period of time. Think about it. When you are moving to a different area of the country, one of the most common questions you will ask is "what is the climate like there?" If you are moving to Arizona, perhaps you know that the climate there is arid and dry, like a desert. But does that mean it is arid and dry everyday? No. Arizona can get quite a bit of rain in the Summer. So a statement of climate would be somthing like: "The average temperature for today is 86 degrees." This is not a statement of weather because is is talking about an average over a long period of time (most likely 30 years).
This brings up the famous quote, "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." If it helps you to remember it this way, go for it.
Okay, I can see you are falling asleep, so class is dismissed for now. But, for our next lesson, I want to talk (or write) about the very thing layer of Earth called the atmosphere. After all, you do call it home.
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Everyone at my house is ready to read.
Looking forward.
HH
Thanks.
..tsk,tsk.
Nice point about the way media gives 50% coverage to a 3% viewpoint. They don't do that for political candidates, which tends to keep fresh new parties at their 3% exposure level.
While you do not explicitly state it, you imply in your argument that because only an estimated 3% of climatologists do not believe in anthropogenic global warming that the other 97% must be correct and that if you could only get 97% of the air time, the public would know the truth.
I don't know if you know anything about physics, but this week something really huge happened. Something that almost ALL physicists and cosmologists believed exists, the Higgs boson, commonly referred to as the "god particle," was all but debunked. CERN researchers state there is a 95% probability that the Higgs boson is a mere figment of our imagination.
Stephen Hawking is having the last laugh, of course, because he consistently expressed skepticism of the existence of the particle, but no one paid much attention to him. They all knew, because the way they believe the universe works led them straight to the particle, that it MUST exist. They were wrong.
I don't know the Higgs boson from a hole in the ground, nor do I know the source of global warming. But what I do know is that scientists who become so enamored of theories that they stop looking to disprove them (and I am not speaking of the folks with the collider, they set up an experiment that allowed them to be proved wrong), cease to be scientists, and become mere propagandists. Your job as a scientist is to BE a skeptic.
Arm your students with the tools to be skeptical of the other side of the argument, but if you do not arm them with the tools to be skeptical of your argument, too, you are not a scientist, but a propagandist.
The Higgs boson was a hypothesis. Anthropomorphic contribution to climate change is an observation.
Thank you for bringing this distinction into the light.
"Actually, I have the privilege to work at the place where Albert Einstein used to work, who established the theory of relativity. There are still some physicists around who do not believe in that. What I'm saying is the system of science is a trial and error system, of course. We get ever more confident in the course of decades. We may revise some assumptions—we get new data and so on—but all-in-all, it's an extremely careful system according to very strict rules of peer review and all things. And in the end if the entire community moves toward a certain consensus, which is not a certainty, never really, something really, really dramatic has to happen in order to revise that.
But the problem with the politicians really is they ask us to provide 100 per cent certainty. You will never get 100 per cent certainty when it comes to fairly complicated issues. So my general metaphor is this: when we talk about with 95 per cent certainty about global warming having devastating impacts on Australia, say, and people say, 'What about the rest? The residual five per cent? There is five per cent hope nothing happens.' And I say, 'Just imagine your youngest child is developing very strange disease. You go to an expert, the best expert in the world, and the expert tells you, "Well, we've a 95 per cent chance the child has developed some sort of cancer. There is a treatment but it's fairly risky, but you can go home and hope that the five per cent of my uncertainty is really applying here." What would you do?' And every parent would say, 'Yes, I believe the best expert in the world. I will go for the treatment, whatever it costs, actually.' And I think our planet is precisely in the situation of that child right now."
Dr. Richard Alley discussed this line of research during his 2009 AGU Bjerknes Lecture. A video of his entire lecture is here http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_ videos/A23A.shtml
He pointed out that paleoclimate records provide a test of the hypothesis that cosmic rays are a significant influence on climate, because 40,000 years ago the Earth's magnetic field weakened in what is called the Laschamp anomaly, to about 10% of its current level, which allowed large amounts of cosmic radiation to enter the planetary system.
He displayed this chart http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ySWbrLnrn0o/TlexV9V0SKI/ AAAAAAAAAFc/ner6WYMW6HY/s1600/the+climate+ignores+ it.PNG The section of his lecture where he discusses this issue starts around minute 42:05 in the video.
Quoting from his lecture: "its a really interesting hypothesis. There's really good science to be done on this. But we have reason to believe its a fine tuning knob.... ...We had a big cosmic ray signal [points to the chart] and the climate ignores it. And its just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."
Also, I noticed one of you on the podcast used the "jigsaw puzzle" analogy as a contrast to those who insist climatology is a "house of cards" that can be completely discredited if one problem is found in one scientific paper on any aspect of climatology for instance. The person using the analogy could not say where he first heard it.
I first heard someone compare climate science to a jigsaw puzzle when the US National Academy of Sciences held an event in Washington to announce they had completed what they called "the most comprehensive study of climate change to date", i.e. their five part report entitled "America's Climate Choices". Dr. William Chameides, vice chair of the NAS committee that wrote the report, used the jigsaw puzzle analogy, claiming that he had thought it up. I wrote a post quoting him and others who wrote that report - http://theenergycollective.com/david-lewis/57625/y ou-suddenly-know-what-picture
I enjoyed listening to your podcast.
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