Pulling the climate lever…
Suppose you’re a consulting actuary for a Las Vegas casino. The business rakes in piles of cash, yet most of the customers seem to be having a good time. Every once in a while somebody wins the BMW convertable you have slowly turning around on a turntable under spotlights in the main floor. Every few years, someone wins a million bucks. In spite of that, nobody at the casino is worried about their jobs. When somebody wins big, they check it and pay off with a smile.
Why is that? After all, the games are honest; it’s impossible to predict the next pull of the lever, or when someone might really win a pile. Why aren’t they worried? At best you could judge that a really skilled card player will average better than an inexperienced one. Yet the casino treats the high-rollers like royalty. Why?
It’s because, while the next game can’t be predicted, the aggregate total of all the games can be predicted to very high accuracy. One player can be an anomaly, but thousands of players are a near-certainty. The marketing people figure out how to make the best use of big winners and you, the consultant, figure out what the percentage totals are likely to be. One of the reasons for your work is that you make it possible to spot when someone is screwing with the odds. Your work is of interest not only to the casino, but to their creditors and the state gambling commission.
Think of climate as a casino. We often hear the challenge to climate science. “They can’t even predict tomorrow’s weather! How can they predict a decade from now?”
First, they’re getting pretty damn good at predicting tomorrow’s weather. But they’ve also learned about decadal cycles and ocean currents and long-term temperature trends. They’ve learned how to correct for known flaws in the data and find some signal in all that noise.
So when March is full of snow, and the cartoonists and conservative pundits have a field day mocking climate science, what does it mean that April so far has been more like early June?
Well not a whole lot, really. That isn’t signal, it’s noise. But there’s one signal that’s crystal clear: politicians, pundits and cartoonists who don’t know weather from climate should stay the hell away from Vegas. ‘Cause they’re likely to get taken to the cleaners and wonder what the hell just hit them. Either that or they’re in the pocket of the energy industry, take your pick.
By the way it wasn’t unusually cold in March; there was just a lot of precipitation. In Winter, that takes the form of snow.
Nick Anthis at Scientific Activist has the story: It’s getting kind of warm out there. What I found interesting was his description of the difference between climatologists and meteorologists. Just as climate and weather are different (but related), so are the relative methods of studying them. Here’s an excerpt…
…climate scientists use very different scientific methods from the meteorologists. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who straddled the two worlds when she worked at the Weather Channel, noted that meteorologists used models that were intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but had little accuracy more than seven days out. Dr. Cullen said meteorologists are often dubious about the work of climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future…
It’s been awfully hot here in Illinois the last few days.
Funny the first commenter on that thread – and many climate threads – almost sounds like a parody of climate science deniers. Not presenting any actual evidence contrary to the science – he doesn’t have any – just venting his hatred for Al Gore, etc.
NOTES:
I still hear Al Gore blah blah blah… all the time. Its annoying. No one really knows why they hate him. I can understand not liking his wife, she goes after gamers and Marilyn Manson, but Gore has done some good in the last 30 years. Its just political bullshit. I got into a few conversations last year with the group I worked with. And they just pulled out the same dumb stuff. Every time I mowed over one Faux News talking point another one came up.
Forget the fact that all Gore did was collect evidence for global warming. It makes no sense to shoot him, he’s the messenger. Shoot the scientists if you dont like the evidence.