Climate Catch 22: big bucks, big bets and big mess

“Just as a guide, if you divide the globe into one degree-by- one degree cells – about 65,000 cells – and you run it out for 100 years, it means 40,000,000,000,000,000 calculations.

 “The second problem is we create lots of data. For AR4 in 2007 it was 35 terabytes. For AR5, it is about 30 petabytes. That’s getting to be really seriously worrying. For the next IPCC report, we are not quite clear how we are going to cope with it.”

“Here’s our third problem. We have a big demand for people. We desperately need people who can manage million-line versions of computer code, or learn how to slice-and-dice 50 pedabytes of data...Somehow, we have to bring lots more people through with those skills (41.20mins)

It takes a full-scale system now to hope to cope with the scale climate science demands of its science and what policy-makers and the public demand of the climate scientists. It is no longer a thing two or three people sitting in their offices can get away with doing.

What we really need is lot more kids getting into science and technology to solve the problems my generation is leaving them with. If we lose another generation to lawyers and accountants, we will seriously struggle to stay up to speed in these areas in the future.”

The orthodoxy had to lift its game too, for:

“the demands coming from the impact and adaptation communities to give them the information they need, puts immense pressure on the climate scientists to do what they have been doing much, much better and cleverer in the future” (48.23min.).

 When Pitman mentioned the 40,000,000,000,000,000 calculations, my head started spinning. What if there was a glitch and just one of them was wrong? What about all the dummy variables and assumptions in his 65,000 cells and so on?

Climate Catch-22 Syndrome (CCS) hit me half-way home, when I heard a voice. It was not the one that spoke to Apostle John in The Cave of the Apocalypse. The voice I heard was that of B-25 bombardier, Captain John Yossarian:

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22...He would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them” (Catch-22, p. 56, ch. 5).

For me, CCS arises whenever empirical data confirming cooling is proposed as evidence for – or “is consistent with” - warming, when no amount of contrary evidence can overturn the DAGW paradigm, when “missing” heat hides in the deep ocean, when guesstimates morph into predictions and so on.

One climate scientist, clearly suffering from CCS too, concluded that any “finding that human influence has not contributed substantially to the magnitude of a particular EWE may not be incompatible with a finding that human influence substantially altered the odds of such an event happening (especially a particular threshold exceedence).” Catch-22.