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by pixelfarmer 608 days ago
There was a recent article in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-c...

Seems like the models have quite a few holes. It made me wonder if anyone has considered making a complete list of assumptions that are baked into these models, so they can be looked at in detail.

4 comments

There are families of models that focus on different things, each family with a number of members that have differing paremeter weightingss, etc.

Yes, there are big overviews of the models and how they differ - the IPCC look at the over|under predictions of all the models and look at the spread and assumptions to select a "most probable" middle ground prediction for climate going forward.

For example while the current year has been warmer than expected it's also been cooler than a number of worst case scenarios that assume faster methane releases and water vapor increases, etc.

I had a goto link for a good overview .. currently it's redirecting to:

    The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is working on our digital Special Collections and the connection with OSTI. This includes all LLNL produced Technical Reports, Theses & Dissertations, and eSholarship content. We are working at making these available through OSTI. We apologize for the interruption in service.
> It made me wonder if anyone has considered making a complete list of assumptions that are baked into these models, so they can be looked at in detail.

Yes, they did, it's called an "ensemble model" when multiple models are collated to account for their different modelings.

A friend of mine did his physics PhD on cloud formation at a molecular level exactly to tackle the issue some models had to account for that over longer time scales, most of the holes you can think of from the top of your head have been considered, there are many thousands of very smart people working on these models for the past 30-40 years.

That doesn't surprise me. Yes, would be interesting to see those assumptions, but I guess the issue (as in most modelling of complex systems) is that as you relax the assumptions, the models become intractable.
Do you mean "a full model so that you can analyze it with fluid dynamics, differential equations, and thermodynamics", or do you mean "a pre made Gish Gallop that you can rattle off without having to actually think about any of them"?
Something in-between a macro-economic model and a physical simulation.
Don’t be anti-intellectual by default
The "models are wrong" climate change deniers basically mean that the prior likelihood of someone on the internet being genuinely interested in understanding and improving the models is below 1%.