24 January 2011
Is This Why Many TV Weathercasters are Skeptical of Climate Change?
Posted by Dan Satterfield
There is a common myth on climate change that goes along the lines of “How can they possibly know what the climate will do in a hundred years, when they can’t even get the forecast for tomorrow right”. This seems to be shared among a lot of TV weather people as well, and I think it is one of the main reasons that so many are skeptical of climate change. This, even in the face of an overwhelming scientific consensus.
There is no better web site for putting these myths to rest than John Cook’s Skeptical Science. I recommend different parts of that site almost daily to folks on social media and via email. John has a physics background, and all of the busted myths are based on peer reviewed science.
He recently started a project to cover about a hundred of the most popular myths, and I along with many others have participated in the process. The rebuttals to these commonly heard myths are themselves peer reviewed, and then published on Skeptical Science. The rebuttals come in a basic, intermediate, and advanced form. The result is a scientific answer to the of things you may hear at a cocktail party or God forbid from your local weather person on TV.
I just finished a basic rebuttal on myth I mentioned at the beginning of this post. You can read it on Skeptical Science here and I am posting it below as well.
Basic Rebuttal to: How can they possibly predict the climate a hundred years from now when they can’t get the forecast for the next day right!
This claim is based more on an appeal to emotion than fact. The inference is that climate predictions, decades into the future, cannot possibly be right when the weather forecast for the next day has some uncertainty.
In spite of the claim in this myth, short term weather forecasts are highly accurate and have improved dramatically over the last three decades. However, slight errors in initial conditions make a forecast beyond two weeks nearly impossible.
Record highs and record lows are the result of weather. Increasing numbers of record highs and decreasing record lows is a symptom of climate change. From Meehl et. al*
A change in temperature of 7º Celsius from one day to the next is barely worth noting when you are discussing weather. Seven degrees, however, make a dramatic difference when talking about climate. When the Earth’s AVERAGE temperature was 7ºC cooler than the present, ice sheets a mile thick were on top of Manhattan!
A good analogy of the difference between weather and climate is to consider a swimming pool. Imagine that the pool is being slowly filled. If someone dives in there will be waves. The waves are weather, and the average water level is the climate. A diver jumping into the pool the next day will create more waves, but the water level (aka the climate) will be higher as more water flows into the pool.
In the atmosphere the water hose is increasing greenhouse gases. They will cause the climate to warm but we will still have changing weather (waves). Climate scientists use models to forecast the average water level in the pool, not the waves. A good basic explanation of climate models is available in Climate Change- A Multidisciplinary Approach by William Burroughs.
Source: AMS Policy Statement on Weather Analysis and Forecasting. Bull. Amer Met. Soc.,79,2161-2163
*Image source: Meehl, G. A., C. Tebaldi, G. Walton, D. Easterling, and L. McDaniel (2009), Relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S., Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L23701, doi:10.1029/2009GL040736.
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
“This, even in the face of an overwhelming scientific consensus”
Overwhelming, says who? Surely you’re not referring to the famous ‘97% of all scientists agree’ thing are you?
Read about that here {LINK}
Actually I do not get my science from political writers in the National Post. The “Overwhelming scientific Consensus” was based on PEER REVIEWED research by Naomi Oreskes, and in particular by the late Stephen Schneider published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences here: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/27/12107.full
“Actually I do not get my science from political writers in the National Post.”
FOR THE WIN!!
Nailed it! Lol!
I’m not a TV weathercaster, but I have forecast severe weather, snow, and other goodies in my capacities as a storm chaser, weather watcher, teacher, and NWS co-op observer. And I would guess that the reason most weathercasters don’t buy into AGW is not their inability to forecast short-term weather, but rather the fact that they have been following the weather for years for decades, and have looked up the history of weather before that, and simply do not see that “global warming” is happening.
A case in point – you reference Meehl et al.’s paper showing an increase of Max vs. Min record temperatures. But anyone who knows their weather history will wonder why Meehl started in 1950, and left out the 1930s (I know why!). After all, US max-min data goes back to 1895 or so. If you go back before 1950 and replicate the study, you get a very different impression. Bruce Hall and I have done this – check the links below for our charts, and then tell me that Meehl et al. prove AGW.
If you think Meehl et. al are wrong you should submit your findings to a peer reviewed journal. I will gladly do a post on your findings if and when they are published.
Even if confirmed, it would not make any difference to the results of Meehl et. al. Greenhouse gas forcings were much lower in the early part of the century and the changes you will see would likely be a result of natural oscillations in the climate.
The reasons for using 1950 as a start are clearly explained in the paper:
“Thus,the number of years a station has been operating is an
important aspect of accounting for numbers of records.
Analysis of observed station data for the U.S. has shown that
starting a 1/n calculation by taking all stations available in
mid-20th century produces a credible accounting of records
with distinct seasonal and geographical features..”
and
“We use a subset of nearly 2000 stations of the over
5000 quality controlled NCDC US COOP network station
observations of daily maximum and minimum temperatures,
retaining only those stations with less than 10% missing data
(in fact the median number of missing records over all stations
is 2.6%, the mean number is 1.2%). All station records span
the same period, from 1950 to 2006, to avoid any effect that
would be introduced by a mix of shorter and longer records”
Somehow I figured you’d pull the “peer review” line as a reason for removing the data links I sent with my note. The data is readily available in NCDC listings of statewide max and min tempertures at:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/pub/data/special/maxtemps.pdf and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/pub/data/special/mintemps.pdf
A quick scan of the max list shows half of state maxima occurred in the 1930s. Meehl’s rationale for starting in 1950 is kind of thin, since there’s plenty of long-term US stations with records back to 1900 and earlier. But since he did start in 1950, his results give a very incomplete story of climate change/variability.
May I also note that your recent posts,” While The U.S. Shivered- Amazing Arctic Warmth” and “Another Deep South Snow and Northeast Blizzard? This time the NAO is innocent!”, are not peer reviewed. So it is curious that you delete my “non peer-reviewed” data and post your own. I also note that you provide links to numerous non-peer reviewed pro-AGW sites in your right-hand menu, and consor my links to non-AGW sites in my note.
I link to some excellent blogs all written by people with a good background in science. The difference between science fact and opinion is peer review. If you want to make a claim that is at odds with whats in the literature, write it up and submit it.
Only allowing information subjected to peer review is a device for enforcing conformity with establishment beliefs.
Actually just the opposite, it is designed to weed out arguments for which no reliable facts or observations exist. That said peer review is a necessary but not sufficient gate keeper to the truth.
Anyone can make a claim but if you want to publish it on a peer reviewed journal, you need to back it up with facts. Failure to so will get little attention from most educated people, especially if your claim is in opposition to long/well established science.
I would also add that lots of things that are worth saying cannot be peer reviewed and published because they don’t pass other tests such as originality, being of scientific interest, etc. Then it may take 3 years to get past peer review as was the experience of Roy Spencer for his very important and original work that went against global warming {Words removed due to violation of comment policy}.
The difference between political/faith based opinion and science is peer review. See my other response. Your comment was edited for name calling.
I really appreciate the time and dedication Dan Satterfield puts into his profession and especially into helping laymen like myself understand the causes and the future implications of global climate warming.
Mr. Satterfield may express personal opinions, but those opinions are always based only on published scientific data and studies using methodologies that are subjected to peer-to-peer scientific review. His opinions are, therefore, educated conclusions, based on a lifetime of study and field work.
It is to their disadvantage that his detractors challenge his conclusions with newspaper articles and opinions that are based on junk science. It merely needs to pointed out that the credentials of the people cited are usually poor, to the point of being worthless.
I’m sorry to say, those challenging the facts about our changing global climate are motivated, not by a desire to mitigate the damage, but by crass politics. They deserve to be spanked.
Thanks Dan.
One thing that both Dan and Richard Keen aren’t mentioning is that global warming is a GLOBAL AVERAGE. It’s taking all the data on Earth and boiling it down to a single number. Every smaller place on Earth, like your weathercaster’s city or your European Middle Ages, is not global, it’s local. And local climate changes in every direction. Dan knows this, but Richard Keen and others like him need to be reminded: US averages are a tiny fraction of the global average. They are irrelevant in a discussion of global warming.
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It is called weather, and it is in a constant state of change.
Thanks to Dan Satterfield for taking the time to share his knowledge, especially on this important and increasingly pressing subject.
Seeing such a reasonable and intelligent voice shedding light where there’s so much heat (see what I did there?) gives me hope that we can address this issue with science rather than with emotion — or with the greenwashed, misleading press releases supposedly from “grassroots groups” but actually financed by the petrochemical industry.