Met Office Explains That Climate Change Might Possibly Be Caused By Climate Change

Professor Stephen Belcher, Head of the Met Office Hadley Centre and chair of the meeting, said: “Ultimately what we’ve seen in each of these seasons is shifts in the position of the jet stream which impact our weather in certain ways at different times of year.

“The key question is what is causing the jet stream to shift in this way? There is some research to say some parts of the natural system load the dice to influence certain states of the jet stream, but this loading may be further amplified by climate change.”

Meeting on UK’s run of unusual seasons

In other news, spending your paycheck has been shown to be due to spending your paycheck.

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12 Responses to Met Office Explains That Climate Change Might Possibly Be Caused By Climate Change

  1. “In other news, spending your paycheck has been shown to be due to spending your paycheck.”

    Actually, economists are still debating that one.

  2. tckev says:

    To quote from Prof Robert G Brown Of Duke University on GCMs and Global Warming

    http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds/blog/guest_comments_gcms_and_global_warming_prof_robert_g_brown_duke_university-115271

    Worst of all, one cannot easily use statistics to determine when or if one’s predictions are failing, because damn, climate is nonlinear, non-Markovian, chaotic, and is apparently influenced in nontrivial ways by a world-sized bucket of competing,occasionally cancelling, poorly understood factors. Soot. Aerosols. GHGs.Clouds. Ice. Decadal oscillations. Defects spun off from the chaotic process that cause global, persistent changes in atmospheric circulation on a local basis (e.g. blocking highs that sit out on the Atlantic for half a year) that have a huge impact on annual or monthly temperatures and rainfall and so on.Orbital factors. Solar factors. Changes in the composition of the troposphere, the stratosphere, the thermosphere. Volcanoes. Land use changes. Algae blooms.

    And somewhere, that damn butterfly. Somebody needs to squash the damn thing, because trying to ensemble average a small sample from a chaotic system is so stupid that I cannot begin to describe it. Everything works just fine as long as you average over an interval short enough that you are bound to a given attractor, oscillating away, things look predictable and then — damn, you change attractors. Everything changes!All the precious parameters you empirically tuned to balance out this and that for the old attractor suddenly require new values to work.

    In other words Prof. Belcher chaos rules and your compute models can’t do it.

    • Not really a problem. If you assume the climate is essentially the linear projection of forcings, then it’s not so hard to prove a prediction wrong. Since this is what the IPCC claims, establishing that they are wrong is not so hard.

      • tckev says:

        Yep, that’s the way out of the naturally chaotic system, we’ll just iron out the variables at the stroke of a spreadsheet. Regression works on chaotic attractors – doesn’t it?

    • Belief in chaos in the natural world is anti-science. Science is about reducing the apparent chaos to known causes and effects, finding the chain of cause and effect that describes each observed phenomonon; it is about simplifying the workings of the world thereby, making them thoroughly understandable and understood. There is no room for chaos in science, that is just a late-20th century fad that became one of the latest, easy dogmas for miseducated students of science to spout proudly. What Dr. Brown is really trying to say is, there is no competent climate science yet. He just doesn’t know how to say it, probably not even how to accept it.

      • tckev says:

        The fact that in climate science we are as yet to define all the variables and all the dynamic and interrelating processes, the feedbacks, the couplings, the dependencies is bad enough. We also do not know, and will never find out, the starting condition or a condition that can closely mimic a known time in our climate conditions when we do know all of these relationships and their values. Or at least this cannot be seen in a realizable future time (IMO)
        So yes I agree climate is chaotic, or at lease damn close. It is variable enough for us not to see the whole pattern that defines climate because we have yet to find all the tools required that allows us to know what else is needed. I do not see this changing much in my, or the next few generations – IMO we are that far from solving the problem. Though I live in the hope of being proved wrong on timescale, I very much doubt it.
        But the climate problem is ultimately scientifically solvable.

        • tckev says:

          To cut it down I defer to

          “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me,
          because as we know, there are known knowns;
          there are things we know we know.
          We also know there are known unknowns;
          that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
          But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

          ? Donald Rumsfeld

  3. ArndB says:

    Why surprised? That is enshrined in international law!

    The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) defines in Para. 2. “Climate change” means a change of climate…. „ discussed here: http://www.whatisclimate.com/b202-open-letter.html .

    The starting point of nonsense is that “climate” is generally defined as average weather (by WMO and others) without defining “weather” in the first place. It is a comparison between apples and pears. One item has a physical background; the other item is a ‘man-made’ technical mean, which we know as “statistics”. “Weather” consists of many dozen components (AMS-Glossary), which can be described in many hundred ways. The statistics of single physical element, or specification of atmospheric behaviour, remain an abstract mean. More here: http://www.whatisclimate.com/

  4. Andy Oz says:

    Anthropomorphised “Climate change” is now classified as a problem gambler and a corrupt one at that! “Loaded the dice”!?? He needs to go to gamblers anonymous and clean up his act.

    The only people loading the dice right now are those brave souls rowing through the arctic. They have chosen the coldest year in the last decade to take a trip across the top of Canada. Hope they watched the film “Scott of the Antarctic” before they left to see what they might end up like. “We will remember them”.

  5. Justa Joe says:

    If I follow this guy “loading the dice,” which is done to get more prdictable results in craps, for example, produces less predictable results in the shell game known as climate “science”.

  6. mikegeo says:

    So professor Belcher is saying they don’t really have a consensus on anything and no science has been settled. I’m expecting he’ll do the right thing and advise Gore and Pachauri.

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