Change is upon us

Royalston, MA

Change is upon us here.  The mist is rising from the trout stream this morning under the red, orange, and pine-green trees, the swamp maples have dropped their leaves.  We have had our first frost and more are coming.  We will be away to Cerca Trova in two weeks.

But change is also brewing in the outside world.  We have personally seen the change, the dying reefs, the species shifts, the increased storms, the changing rain patterns, and we are here to tell you it is absolutely happening.  But a cousin sent around an article by a vehement Denier about how, finally, a heroic climate scientist was calling bullshit on the world-wide clamor to act.  So I dug into that article and the climate scientist in question and here’s what I found.  It runs a bit long because it takes some work to unpack the truth.

The article is here https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/tony-thomas/2014/03/finally-real-climate-science/.  It definitely challenges the standing belief that climate change is both real and man-made, so it definitely deserves some real attention.  It makes the challenge with name-calling and shaming, and only one minor scientific argument that is at least worth noting.

The way to credibly assess a scientific position is to examine the people taking the position, the position itself, and the manner in which the position is presented.  Using this approach, several things stand out with Tony Thomas’ article on Quadrant.au about Mototaka Nakamura.

The most obvious one is that Quadrant has an obvious audience and the article sells well with that audience.  Other material on Quadrant is almost entirely name-calling that plays to the people who need to be outraged.  Tony Thomas is himself not a scientist and has never done any modelling work.  He is a “prolific contributor” to Quadrant.  He and Quadrant are clearly making a profit from promoting the controversy.  I.e. he clearly has a conflict of interest.

The other key person is Nakamura.  See https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2013331662_Mototaka_Nakamura   ResearchGate is essentially the IMDB of peer-reviewed science, ie the only credible science because without peer-review you can say anything that will get printed.

Nakamura’s body of work stops in 2010.  His last topic of work largely dealt with baroclinic waves (like the meanders in the jet stream) as factors in various elements of dynamic climate such as the polar vortex phenomenon.  He has published nothing that has a global integrated climate output.  His work has largely dealt with small-scale models of particularly complex non-linear elements.  He has never published work that shows the global observed changes can be ascribed to any mechanism other than green house gas emissions.  I.e. he is not a published global climate scientist.

Thomas paraphrases Nakamura, since what Nakamura has actually written is not readily available.  Nakamura’s book does exist but there is no way to actually read it since it is indeed in Japanese https://www.amazon.com/kikoukagakushanokokuhaku-chikyuuonndannkahamikennshounokasetsu-Japanese-Nakamura-Mototaka-ebook/dp/B07FKHF7T2/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=mototaka+nakamura&qid=1570052979&s=digital-text&sr=1-1 .  The excerpts in English that Thomas offers are not translation-cited.  But in those excerpts I see a lot of language of Nakamura “throwing sour grapes”.  Nakamura's specific complaint that Thomas reports is that climate modelling is so complicated that drawing conclusions is useless.  From the get-go this is a bit strange since Nakamra's entire body of science work is in fact built on computer modelling. 

Just how accurate is Thomas’ interpretation of a book in Japanese, since I am willing to be that Thomas doesn’t read Japanese? Note that I am operating only on Thomas’ presentation.   And he has already been shown to have a conflict of interest.  But it is all we have to go on for now.

There is a fundamental truth in science, a sine dicens since it is so utterly obvious, which a Canadian economist George Box put into eloquent words about two decades ago: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.  In this specific case, the question is - can these models be used to predict our near future?

Every single scientist who is an actual scientist knows that his/her model (a.k.a theory-expressed-as-equations) is incomplete.  The way computer models are built is to assemble the equations which describe the phenomenon, fit the equations’ parameters (the A, B, C etc, typically multiplier factors) to a set of known data (called the ‘learning set’), and then test that fit with a new set of data (called ‘the test set’).  This is indeed how nearly all climate modelling has been done.

You might ask how is both a ‘learning set’ and a ‘test set’ obtained.  Good question.  In the climate situation where the only climate data are historical, i.e. you can’t just run the experiment again and collect a new set of data, one way is to draw the learning data from one subset of the measurements, say every other reading, and the test set is the remaining data.  Another way is to fit the model to one output parameter, say global temperature, and test against a different parameter, say sea level.  This latter approach is much more powerful and is the basis for most of the predictions being made.  

Predictions are the central point of contention in Thomas’ write-up, since Thomas says Nakamura says predictions can’t be done by modelling even though he has done so himself.   In an absolute sense, this is correct.  Another sine discens is that “extrapolations are hazardous.”  Predictions can be legitimately made out as far as the model error diverges to where it’s judged the predictions are not confident, typically the 95% confidence level. However, the way climate predictions are being done, using about 100,000 years of historical data, is to only look at model outputs for the next 50-100 years, which is only a few sample points ahead of Now and are well within the 95% confidence interval of the models.  This is perfectly legitimate and is almost always done with models.  For models being built with recorded data from the post-industrial age, the predictions are still being only pushed out to where the model error is excessive.

In fact the echo cancellation technology in your long distance phone connections does this every single time you make a phone call, predicting the sounds that will bounce back on the line and subtracting them before putting the result on to your ears.  Do you remember hearing echos on your long distance calls?  Not for a long while now.  I.e. the models are now good enough to predict the signal to several seconds, which is in fact several thousand sample intervals ahead of Now.

As for the manner in which Thomas presents the results, note the language and tone of it all as disparaging and only one single scientific argument. That argument is interesting.  Thomas says that Nakamura says that existing climate models can only be made to fit by adjusting some model parameters to outrageous values. I have no way to assess the validity of this statement itself since I am not active in the model-making work and have not dug in to the models themselves.  But if this is the case, then it is a legitimate complaint.  

In my own modelling work for my doctorate, I arrived at bizarre parameter values, for example negative volumes for the heart, in order to get the models to fit the data.  My doctoral committee pointed this out and I was able to show many more instances where the model fit without resorting to weird parameter values.  And in the end, my model was able to successfully predict and remove the signal in question, much like the echo cancellation example above, so we all said “there must be more to this beastie” and drove on.

Which is the case with climate science.  Everyone knows there’s more to the beastie.  Saying that the beastie is too complicated so we are just going to ignore it is specious at best and fatal at worst.  The entire September issue of the Economist is saying that the non-linear tipping points are beyond current science, for now, but the results are unanimously foreboding.  But science progresses when the next kid up takes what’s been done and adds in another factor to get to an even better model.  Which is what has been going on with climate science since the first warning report was presented to President Johnson in 1965 (which he ignored BTW).

Ultimately, there’s my own observations in the real world.  I have traversed the Caribbean for 40 years of which the last 10 years have seen 15,000 miles under sail.  Climate has absolutely changed since 1980’s.  No question, I am here to testify to it.  Will it continue to change?  All the models say yes, it is changing 100 fold faster than has ever been seen in geobiologic history, and that the factors which we can measure also can account for that change in ways that predict no slowing of the change within our kids’ lifetimes (which is a blink of an eye in geobiologic history)

But bottom line, are the predictions accurately, absolutely correct?  No.  All models are wrong but some are useful.  The translations of Nakamura reads like a spoiled perfectionist, not a thoughtful scientist working to address the situation.  There is way too much hysteria and not enough discussion.  Nakamura does not help the situation.  

But are the predictions useful?  Absolutely.  They are clearly fitting what is being observed well enough that each decade the situation becomes more clearly problematic.  Does it matter if we see another 1oC increase in 30 years or in 50?  Not in the sense that it’s all bad news and we need to be doing something about it.  And are we thinking about the consequences of that news to us and our cruising?  Absolutely. However, notice that we personally are not selling the boat and buying a survivalist’s cabin on high ground.

The real question is whether we, the world village, are willing to take the risk that the predictions are fundamentally wrong.  The canaries in the coal mine are screaming, the managers are saying there’s a problem, and we can’t get out of the coal mine.