January 19, 2006
THE DATELINE IS APT:
Experiment probes climate riddle (Richard Black, 1/19/06, BBC News)
Darwin, AUS--A three-week experiment to resolve the biggest riddle in climate science begins in Australia on Thursday.Scientists will use radar, aeroplanes, weather balloons and a ship to study the life cycle of tropical clouds.
They are searching for details of how clouds form and carry heat high up into the atmosphere.
A better understanding of these crucial processes should lead to computer models that can predict the extent of global climate warming more accurately.
Current projections of global temperature rise, reported in the last assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), see increases by the end of the century that range from 1.4 to 5.8C.
The spread of possible temperatures represents a huge uncertainty - and much of it stems from unknowns to do with how the world's economy will develop over coming decades.
But there is also uncertainty over how the climate will react, and one of the key issues centres on a poor understanding of what goes on inside clouds - how they form, and how they behave.
Not that being clueless about the main components of their models has stopped scientists from dreaming up projections willy-nilly. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 19, 2006 8:12 AM
If past experience is any guide, it will turn out that the previous "understanding" of the phenomena was off by several hundred percent. But we will wait in vain for the new "understanding" to have any effect on the model predictions.
Amusing that they say the models range from +1.4 to +5.8. I constructed models in Excel that range from -134 to +86. Why aren't these included by the BBC? Mine are just as scientific as the ones they cite.
Posted by: pj at January 19, 2006 1:04 PM