Saturday 11 February 2017

Current Overview

Well, there's not been much progress on tieing down the science of climate. Microbes in the atmosphere maybe seeding clouds.  They definitely make a difference.

The Atlantic is moving into a cold phase which will, over several years, cause UK's weather to get colder, akin to the 1960s.
However, it's likely that the additional carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere (much less than was predicted) will raise night temperatures slightly.  And of course, the heat our towns and cities spew out also raises average temperature. (which I understand is included in the calculations)

The only certainty is that the average temperature has been increasing very slowly, with lots of ups and downs along the way, for over 250 years at a fairly steady rate.
For the past 50 years or so, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been very slowly increasing. The night-time temperatures have also been increasing during this period.

We need to wait lots more years before having any certainty on how much, why and what the best policy response should be.

Basically, the universe is 'determined' in that each little step moves on in a determined way from the previous position.  Our physics is not yet sufficient to move from the little nano-steps to be able to predict the end result e.g. you can't take the properties of a water molecule and use them to predict how water flows downhill.
However, climate science does take carbon-dioxide molecular properties and make prediction of the Earth's future average temperature, thus ignoring the mathematics of complex systems.