Page 19/45 of a presentation by Captain Jianzhong Wang of the icebreaker R/V Xuelong given to the COMNAP Sea Ice Challenges Workshop 12-13 May 2015 in Hobart, Session 1. The presentation is well worth a read – some great photos.
Page 19/45 of a presentation by Captain Jianzhong Wang of the icebreaker R/V Xuelong given to the COMNAP Sea Ice Challenges Workshop 12-13 May 2015 in Hobart, Session 1. The presentation is well worth a read – some great photos.
The Chinese captain reports several cases of getting trapped in the Xue Long, the last of which was during the rescue of the “Ship of Fools” over Christmas/New Year 2013/14.
Yet there seems to be no reference in any of these papers to the dangers of allowing Green activists to go on sightseeing tours of the Antarctic. In the Ship of Fools incident, two ships were eventually trapped in ice, and had to be rescued by a third that was diverted from resupplying a research base. Dangerous helicopter transfers of passengers were involved. Luckily no one was killed, but God knows what the “carbon footprint” of the whole futile escapade would have been.
Re the climate implications, buried in the fine print of one of the articles is this little gem:
“Our understanding of the drivers and impacts of Southern Ocean and sea ice change remains incomplete, limiting our ability to predict the course of future change (Kennicutt et al., 2014). This incomplete understanding is to some degree reflected in climate model results. Simulation of net Arctic SIE from the latest CMIP5 climate models, as analysed by Shu et al. (2014), are consistent with the decreasing trend in observed SIE and, broadly, the spatial distribution of this change. However this is not the case for Antarctic simulations, where the sign of the trend of net SIE is incorrect. It has been suggested that not including ice‐shelf basal melt in climate models is one of the reasons global coupled models currently fail to simulate the observed regional increase in Antarctic SIE (Bintanja and others, 2013). It is quite probable that other important mechanisms are similarly missing from climate models. Table 1 contains an extended list of questions raised within the SCAR Horizon Scan process. Answers to these and other questions might help us gain a better understanding of the complex interactions and subsequently help us close the gap between model simulations and observations.”
www.comnap.aq/SiteAssets/SitePages/SeaIceWorkshop/Sea%20Ice%20Challenges%20Workshop%20Abstracts%2021%20May%202015.pdf (Phil Reid of the BoM)
Am I to understand that as:
The computer model predicts sea ice melting, but it is actually increasing, so if we include a fudge factor for hidden ice melting we might be able to make the model output look a bit better?
Graeme no. 3,
That’s more or less the size of it.
But what specially appealed to me about Phil Reid’s paragraph is its classic representation of how to handle the fact that observations are defying model outputs.
In real science one would discard the hypothesis, i.e. the model. As Feynman used to say, if it disagrees with observations, it’s WRONG. Back to the old drawing board.
But in climate studies, the models are everything. Without models there is no scare, and without a scare there is no money.
So instead you start looking for fudge factors to make model outputs come out closer to reality. Then, for a while, you can pretend that the model is “validated” – until, inevitably, it makes some other wrong prediction, in which case you repeat the process. And meanwhile there are lots of models and there is always one that happens to be as yet unfalsified on this or that parameter. The important thing is to keep a model – one model in a hundred is enough – in play at all times.
Phil Reid’s variation on this scenario shows real mastery of climate scare technique:
“Our understanding of the drivers and impacts of Southern Ocean and sea ice change remains incomplete, limiting our ability to predict the course of future change”. Translation: We know stuff-all about what determines sea ice concentrations, and can’t predict them.
But never mind the quality, feel the width. Arctic sea ice is shrinking, just like models say. So models are nearly right, there is just a little temporary difficulty in the Southern Hemisphere:
“However this is not the case for Antarctic simulations, where the sign of the trend of net SIE is incorrect.”
I love that phrase: “the sign of the trend of net SIE is incorrect”. Sign…trend…net…incorrect, and an acronym for the phenomenon in question. Each word minimises the stark fact that Southern sea ice is expanding, not contracting, so the models are wrong.
Still, with more, lots more, funding, we could get answers that
“might help us gain a better understanding of the complex interactions and subsequently help us close the gap between model simulations and observations.”
The whole rigmarole obfuscates the fact that we don’t know anything like enough about climate to make useful predictions of this or any other multi-decadal changes in climate variables – and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. But that truth is unpronounceable, given the billions riding on the illusion that it is not the case.
Hi Graeme no. 3 and David Brewer,
No, that’s not the size of it.
Modelling sea ice is more difficult than putting a few words together in a blog.