Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House

An article published yesterday at the Washington Post.

Apparently some government scientists are feeling unhappy and "intimidated" because "Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing." The usual comparisons to Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union are made. There's a lot more, of course, but apparently they're upset because they're no longer allowed to say any old thing they want to the media on the subject or publicly draw policy conclusions from their research. (e.g. "We must cut anthropogenic CO2 emissions in half IMMEDIATELY if the planet is to survive this century!!!")

Why does this bother me? There are so many more significant issues out there to blog about- immigration, radical Islam, national security,China, N. Korea, etc. I probably will comment on these another time. I guess the article stirred a lot of thoughts I've been mulling over for some time about my field, atmospheric science, and science in general.

When computers became a practical reality, it was a real revolution for the physical sciences, especially those that are mathematics intensive. No longer did you need a room full of graduate students to do the computations necessary for even the simplest mathematical model. Computers are fast, efficient, and don't get tired and make arithmetical errors. What a boon! Especially in the atmospheric sciences where the models must use complex, nonlinear differential equations to come close to reality. (You can use linear equations for some simple problems, but they are very limited). Anyway, as time as gone by, atmospheric science has come to rely on these models, which are full of assumptions about how researchers think the atmosphere works. Even with all the computational power, some things are just not well described mathematically such as water phase changes and cloud physics. When you add the other factors that must come into play in any climate model - interactions with oceans and their currents, solar inputs, feedback effects within the atmosphere itself, you've got one big, nonlinear, honkin' model that probably has its own feedback effects.

The problem I have with all this is not the models themselves, but their godlike standing, shall we say, in the atmospheric community. They are useful tools, but are NOT the last word on climate, nor should they ever be. If I learned anything at all from studying Chaos theory, it is that nonlinear computations are just not accurate after a certain point, and past that a random guess is as good as any output from the computer. Yet, when I was a graduate student, 90% of the seminars I attended were people trotting out their latest models and speaking as though they were accurately predicting what the future climate will be. What is even more discouraging is that there seems to very little effort going into figuring out how the real world climate works. Most research positions seem to consist of minding a supercomputer and running or adapting models as though that were the only way to approach the problem.

So I think the real complaint from the government scientists in the article is not so much that they have vital information to impart that is being censored as it is that they can't bring out the latest scary results from their climate models and have their 15 min. of fame. Nobody in the media wants to hear about uncertainties or Poincare. But "we're all gonna die" has a certain ring to it and will get you at least a mention in the papers.