= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
drnickbone comments on Separating the roles of theory and direct empirical evidence in belief formation: the examples of minimum wage and anthropogenic global warming - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (65)
I never said anything about an increase in variance, temperature records haven't been around long enough for it to be hard to find record setting temperatures somewhere. Also, I notice you're shifting your hypothesis from "temperatures are rising" to "variance is rising".
As for the argument in the linked comic, when wine grapes can be grown in England and Newfoundland, as was the case during the medieval warm period I'll start taking arguments of that type seriously.
The Climatic Research Unit for the no more snow in Britain. The Manhattan underwater one (or at least the West Side Highway) is Jim Hansen.
Reading your referenced article (Independent 2000):
Clearly the Climatic Research Unit was not predicting no more snow in Britain by 2014.
Regarding the alleged "West Side Highway underwater" prediction, see Skeptical Science. It appears Hansen's original prediction timeframe was 40 years not 20 years, and conditional on a doubling of CO2 by then.
Yes, but some googling suggests that average snowfall in England hasn't changed very much over the 2000s, which doesn't seem consistent with the linked article.
"Over the 2000s" is certainly too short a period to reach significant conclusions. However the longer term trends are pretty clear. See this Met Office Report from 2006.
Figure 8 shows a big drop in the length of cold spells since the 1960s. Figure 13 shows the drop in annual days of snow cover. The trend looks consistent across the country.
I think the first question here is whether we have reached agreement on the forecasts being wrong, not what excuses should be made or conclusions drawn from said wrongness.
Yes, I'm sure they were, and that those were the basis for the mistaken prediction. Your point?
I think we have agreement that:
A) The newspaper headline "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past" was incorrect
B) The Climatic Research Unit never actually made such a prediction
C) The only quoted statement with a timeline was for a period of 20 years, and spoke of heavy snow becoming rarer (rather than vanishing)
D) This was an extrapolation of a longer term trend, which continued into the early 2000s (using Met Office data published in 2006, of course after the Independent story)
E) It is impossible to use short periods (~10 years since 2006) to decide whether such a climatic trend has stopped or reversed.
I can't see how that counts as a failed prediction by the CRU (rather than the Independent newspaper). If the CRU had said "there will be less snow in every subsequent year from now, for the next 20 years, in a declining monotonic trend" then that would indeed be a failed prediction. However, the CRU did not make such a prediction... no serious climate researcher would.
From the article:
Does heavy snow cause chaos in England now?
Is snow a 'very rare and exciting event' in England now?
If we asked them, would they not know first-hand what snow is, anymore than they know first-hand what wolves are?
You can't?
What's the date?
By your reaction, and the selective down votes, I have apparently fallen asleep, it is the 2020s already, and a 20-year prediction is already falsified.
But in answer to your questions:
A) Heavy snow does indeed already cause chaos in England when it happens (just google the last few years)
B) My kids do indeed find snow a rare and exciting event (in fact there were zero days of snow here last winter, and only a few days the winter before)
C) While my kids do have a bit of firsthand knowledge of snow, it is vastly less than my own experience at their age, which in turn was much less than my parents' experience.
If you are a resident of England yourself, and have other experiences, then please let me know...
Well, all the quotes I gave were drawn from http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html which was 14 years ago. That sounds like it'd cover 'within a few years'. And as for the exact 20 year forecast of 2010, well, that's just 6 years away. Not a lot of time to catch up.
Yes, looks like the usual chaos you could find in the '80s and '90s to which the predicted 'chaos' was being compared as being greater.
And has your region changed much? And is your anecdote very trustworthy compared to the nation-wide changes in snowfall since 2000 (not much) when these predictions were made?
Sigh... The only dated prediction in the entire article related to 20 years, not 14 years, and the claim for 20 years was that snow would "probably" cause chaos then. Which you've just agreed is very likely to be true (based on some recent winters where some unexpected snow did cause chaos), but perhaps not that surprising (the quote did not in fact claim there would be more chaos than in the 1980s and 1990s).
All other claims had no specific dates, except to suggest generational changes (alluding to a coming generation of kids who would not have experienced snow themselves).
Regarding the evidence, I already gave you Met Office statistics, and explained why you can't get reliable trend info on a shorter timescale. You then asked anecdotal questions (is snow "rare and exciting", what would kids say if you asked them?) and I gave you anecdotal answers. But apparently that's not good enough either! Is there any set of evidence that would satisfy you?
Still if you really want the statistics again, then the very latest published Met Office set runs up to 2009 if you really want to check, and the downward trend lines still continue all the way to the end of that data. See for instance this summary figures 2.32 and 2.35.
So if you want to claim that the trend in snow has recently stopped/reversed, then you are looking at a very short period (some cold winters in 2010-14). And over periods that short, it's entirely possible we'll have another shift and be back onto the historic trend for the next five year period. So "catch up in six years" doesn't sound so implausible after all.