In a model. Which is the "in mice" equivalent in climate science. But heh, I like a new version of Sim City as much as anyone else.

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biblioman 7 months ago | parent [-]

By "'in mice' equivalent", do you mean "a useful way to make statements about things that can't be directly measured"?

Assuming you don't mean that, that's not a gotcha. Practically all of science is "in a model". We can't observe an alternative universe where DNA doesn't mutate, but that doesn't disprove evolution.

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anonym29 7 months ago | parent [-]

I'm not saying we shouldn't observe and try to learn more with an open, curious, and inquisitive mind.

I'm saying we shouldn't be making definitive high-confidence assertions along the lines of "there's mathematical proof that anthropogenic climate change is the factor that causes X more deaths in Y storm".

Because this isn't a matter of 2+2=4. There are more variables at play here than the combination of our intelligence and our technology allows us to accurately model.

If what we brought to the table was good enough, we could consistently and accurately predict the weather a week out.

Also, I want to be completely clear that my counterpoints here are not a refutation that human activity is a contributing factor to climate change (it absolutely is a factor), or that climate change isn't happening (the climate is absolutely changing). I'm simply suggesting is that there are more factors besides human activity that are also contributing factors. We also don't know what all of these factors are yet, and I'm not aware of any techniques that allow you to isolate the impact of any individual factor in a complex system without knowing even how many other factors there are to control for, let alone what the values of those unknown factors are.

	▲	seadan83 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		At this juncture, I'm sorry that I'm having trouble understanding the exact counter point. > Also, I want to be completely clear that my counterpoints ... I appreciate these clarifications, thank you. To paraphrase the article a bit, storm models basically are looking back at storms and are comparing storms with differing temperatures. We can then use this to understand what difference a couple degrees makes, this difference is due to climate change (which has raised temps by a couple degrees). > If what we brought to the table was good enough, we could consistently and accurately predict the weather a week out. I don't think so - this sounds like shifting the goalposts. Looking at past events is much better for controlling comparable variables compared to predicting future events. Predicting future events is a whole different ballgame vs saying "had Y happened, it would have looked like X, which did Z". Which is also to say: the variables of these two storms line up, except for the temperature variable - and this was the difference in windspeed between the two storms. Seemingly the models are relatively predictive over the dataset they have, and since we are looking back at existing events - it does seem more solid for analysis compared to predicting future storms. The full methodology is not stated beyond this. So, our criticism of accounting for variables or neglecting variables is from a position of ignorance. FWIW - This is the pertinent section from the article below: > “Climate models and observations are both showing us that, in a world without climate change, temperatures would be somewhere between 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler,” Gilford said. Because the intensity of a hurricane is determined foremost by the temperature of the seas over which it passes, Gilford and team used the pre-warming sea surface temperatures to determine the maximum wind speeds that any particular hurricane theoretically would have reached without climate change. From there, they used statistical relationships gleaned from past hurricane seasons to estimate what the wind speeds might have been without warming. They could then compare these numbers against the speeds that were actually recorded to determine how much climate change likely ramped up the intensity.