The other day, someone asked me what I thought might have caused global warming, if it is not anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Flippantly, I said I thought that it was probably the development of the computer.
When we look around the world, convincing evidence of a rapidly changing climate is rather difficult to find. The historic temperature record endorsed by the IPPC indicates only a 0.6 ° C increase in temperature during the 20th century; hardly perceptible without a very sensitive thermometer. Most of our fears about climate change are actually based on predictions about what could happen in the future, not what has already happened, or even what is happening at the moment. So where does information about the climate come from?
It is tempting to think of climate scientists as hardy, open-air types, who bestride the globe fearlessly traversing Antarctic glaciers or sailing the oceans to make observations that will unlock the secrets of the natural world. But these are merely the foot soldiers of the discipline. The cutting edge research, which we so often hear about in the media, is undertaken in far more prosaic circumstances; in cosy offices sitting in front of computers which process arcane statistical procedures in an effort to make sense of observations that reveal only tiny variations in the data.
Both the historic temperature record, and attempts to anticipate what may happen in the future, require industrial scale number crunching. In the case of the predictions, this requires the most powerful supercomputers that are presently available, and climate modellers consider even these to be inadequate, and say that they need a thousand times more computing power. (Here)
If we go back just a hundred years or so, to the beginning of the last century, things were very different. The infant science of climatology was concerned with temperature variations on a far grander scale. Evidence of ice ages that buried large parts of the earth’s surface under thousands of feet of all-destroying ice had finally won acceptance, but the cause of these convulsions was still unknown.
A Serbian mechanical engineer called Milutin Milankovich became interested in this problem and suspected that perturbations in the earth’s orientation to the sun might hold the answer. It had long been known that there are variations in the obliquity, precession and eccentricity (tilt, pitch and wobble) of our planet, and that these follow lengthy and complex cycles. Periodic changes in the duration and intensity of sunlight falling on the earth’s surface, and a possible correlation between these cycles and the supposed dates of ice ages, might explain temperature changes that trigger extended period of intense cold.
The task that Milankovich set himself was not small. In order to discover whether a correlation existed, he had first to calculate the angle and duration of incoming radiation from the sun in each season, and for every latitude, over a timescale of a million years. This was not a task suited to someone with a short attention span, but it seems to have appealed to Milankovich, who settled down to twenty years of meticulous, repetitive calculations armed only with a slide rule, paper and pencils.
In 1930, Milankovich published his findings in book called Mathematical Climatology and the Astronomical Theory of Climate Change. Unfortunately he was unable to demonstrate the that there was a connection between the earth’s orientation and the onset of ice ages because of the lack of precision with which the ice ages could be dated at that time. He died in 1958, and it was not until the 1970s that new techniques for dating sea floor sediments lead to a revised chronology of the ice ages that confirmed his hypothesis.
In the age of the computer, the calculations that consumed a large slice of Milankovich’s life would probably be completed in little more time than it takes to make a cup of coffee, and that can only be of great benefit to science. But there are also pitfalls.
It is questionable whether a change in global mean temperature of little more than half a degree centigrade could have been detected with any certainty in the days before computers were generally available. Quite simply, it would have been virtually impossible to assemble, collate, adjust, and process the immense amount of data involved, let alone draw conclusions that rely on variations of tenths, or even hundredths, of a degree centigrade.
In our own time, the immense power of computer programs like Excel, R, and Matlab, which alow even non-statisticians to create highly complex statistical constructs, are available to all. But it is surprising, in view of the extent to which climate science relies on statistics, that very few statisticians are involved in climate research. In the course of the Hockey Stick graph controversy, Edward Wegman, (eminent American statistician) found that not one statistician was involved in a reconstruction of past climate which was heralded as proof that 1998 was the warmest year in the past millennium, and the 1990s the warmest decade. Yet the Hockey Stick relies on statistical analysis of the rather uncertain influence of temperature on the annular rings of ancient trees.
Climate scientists now have easy access to advanced, and often controversial, techniques of statistical analysis, which they are not necessarily competent to employ. If human emissions of greenhouse gases really are changing the climate, then warnings made possible by these techniques may be immensely valuable. But if the significance of a slight increase in temperature has been blown up out of all proportion, then that is a very different, but perhaps no less serious, problem that may take many years to correct.
Perhaps it is not so flippant after all to suggest that computers may have caused global warming, and that in the days of Milankovich and his slide rule, it could never have happened.
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Thought I had commented yesterday but may have failed to push the right button?
Excellent blue sky thinking and flippancy is often the only way to get there.
I totally agree that if we were still in the hands of slide rules then common sense would have time to intervene and the terror of so called global warming would not exist.
Computers give quasi intellectual weight to illogical theories by merit of their fantastic ability to number crunch.
Yes, since the ice age the world has got progressively warmer and production of CO2 causes this and that is why we exist.
The fact that computers can crunch enough retrospective data to indicate a trend is not really a sound reason for forging new political policy.
There is another factor in that computers create a speed of communication which again fails to allow sufficient time for common sense to intervene.
Can I also propose that computers created a foot and mouth epidemic and disaster from a small endemic cluster! It was the speed at which the transfer of information from word of
mouth at the weekly market and local pub was transformed from a weekly update to a split second response from the pressing of a few buttons on the computer to get to the Defra website that created the disaster.
I am sure the same can also be said in the present failure in the banking world?
Re: #3, Philip
I like the idea that rapid computation doesn’t leave time for common sense to moderate our thinking, and I’m sure that it’s true. There is also the problem of feature bloat along the lines of: ‘I know that the computer can do this, and by God I’m going to think of a good reason for doing it even if I’m not really sure that there really is one’.
And then there is the matter of adjustments to data. One of the things that astonished me when I stared taking an interest in climate science was how rarely conclusions are drawn from raw data. There is an intervening process of modification and, although I understand why this is necessary with, say, weather station readings, the judgments that must be made introduce the risk of subconscious bias. I wonder how often an error that tends towards warming gets through, while one that indicates cooling is rigorously investigated? But by the time it has all been fed through the mangle of the number cruncher, as you suggest, the result has a spurious authority, or perhaps the process has just become so complex that there is little chance of backtracking and checking. In the days when adjustments were made ‘by hand’, a human being had to scrutinise each piece of data, and might notice something untoward. Now that algorithms are applied to huge batches of data in the twinkling of an eye, this kind of scrutiny becomes far more difficult.
If ever you feel like expanding on what you said abut the foot and mouth outbreak I would be interested, as this is new to me.
I understand that the use of mathematical models to predict risk is one of the practices that is being blamed for the banking crisis. Probability theory is at the heart of all predictive models of chaotic systems, and I suspect that there may be quite a lot of policymakers who will become rather more cautious about taking what climate scientists say about future climate on trust.
Yes, not sure how to blog but I agree with your spurious authority statement….just like the “sources close to the minister” comment and your J Paxman piece. Excellent. Tell the masses what you need to verify your intentions and suffix it with “according to the latest computer profiles”………..
Foot and Mouth, in my opinion, is endemic at a low level when its symptoms are flu like and very rarely get to be seen in the latter stages of aggressive blistering.
Just before foot and mouth “broke” farming was on it’s knees and the value of an old ewe was virtually nil. I beleive that in response to the NFU lobbying for a compulsory cull or purchase arrangement to reduce supply and stimulate demand, the government saw this as an accounting ploy to get compensation from the EEC.
An outbreak was located by ministry vets and reported as such. Having invoked EEC “Enzootic epidemic” force majeure criteria under EEC rules the government then sat back and expected a controllable outbreak from which livestock would be culled and compensated for out of EEC funding.
What happened was that the election made the treasury extremely generous with their valuations in order to prevent disgruntled rural voters and the computer made the uptake uncontrollable.
As soon as the Foot and Mouth valuations appeared on the website (as opposed to being mere pub talk)the £90 on offer was taken up by any farmer who had an elderly flock with some ewes being worth 90 times more than a non F&M valuation. This spread like wildfire among farming circles and farmers put up their hands like a forest to say “please sir, i think i may have Foot and mouth”.
There were no vets who were prepared to risk their professional indemnity by stating that suspected animals they went to see categorically did not have foot and mouth and some of them also had outstanding bills within the ailing farming industry that needed to be paid.
It then became a mad rush to transform pre Foot and Mouth values into post Foot and mouth compensation and the computer induced this panic. It became addictive and the computer could tell you how close it was to you and I remember logging on every morning to watch the shape of the graph in a sort of voyeristic frenzy.
If the computer had not been available (and surprisingly there is so much paperwork in farming that 60% of farms do have one)commonsense would have made farmers question what was happening and the speed at which the financial carrot was taken up would have been much slower and the countryside would not have been littered with burning piles of carcasses.
Finally the computer makes everything very personal. It is the ultimate readers Digest type “you have been specially selected” offer and to see massive financial valuations in front of you on the screen was too much for most struggling farmers to resist.
The proof of all this is that the number of confirmed cases of foot and mouth (the only foolproof test was a post mortem on brain tissue)was extremely small.
I shall try to find the actual figure for you!
It may not be in the sense that has been intended, but 1 billion computers worldwide certainly are making their contribution to global warming.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12992-computer-servers-as-bad-for-climate-as-suvs.html
Unless the energy used is generated by nuclear or other low CO2 emission methods, that is.
On the other hand, computers do allow the modelling of very complex systems and anyone who has done this, not just in connection with AGW, knows how illumuninating they can be, and how they can give a tremendous boost to an understanding of any problem.
This reminds me of a joke: Q. How many climate sceptics does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None they prefer to live in the dark.
Re: #5 Philip
That is certainly a take on the F&M outbreak that I haven’t seen before, but I can see how it might be so, and how the availability of information could drive what, in effect, became a new market for depreciated stock. What proportion of beasts were post mortemed? One from each farm where there was a cull or was it more random than that? And how did the results compare between farms where there was a cull because an outbreak was suspected and the contiguous culls that took place as a result? If F&M is endemic, then would you expect a high proportion of beasts in the contiguous culls to show signs of infection?
Re: #6 Peter
Thanks for the link to the New Scientist article. Had I known about it when I wrote the header post then I would probably have used it as an example. Here are a few of the things that I learned from it:
In terms of CO2 emmissions, 1 server = 1 SUV.
There are 1 billion computers in operation worldwide.
2% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are caused by computers.
Computer storage capacity increased by 48% while air passenger numbers increased by 2%.
And this was just from the first few paragraphs. Presumably the research and polls that underlie these figures was processed on computers, and it all sounds terribly convincing. But how do I know whether the good folk from Global Action Plan had any formal training in either market research or statistics? Both of these disciplines look easy to the amateur, but require considerable skill to be used reliably. I notice there is no reference to the extent to which electronic data processing has displaced the old paper based methods. Do their figures take account of the effect this has had on CO2 emissions, and if so what confidence can we have in the estimates?
What is certain, is that an article using this kind of evidence would not have been published thirty years ago. The data would not have been available. Only the computer has made it possible, and it is the computer that provides a semblance of authenticity for what may, or may not, be a load of nonsense.
So far as models are concerned, I agree with every word you say. As analytical tools, and as a means of initial testing of hypotheses, they are immensely useful. The problems arise when this is conflated into using models as predictive tools to forecast the behaviour of vast chaotic systems such as financial markets and the climate. Then one begins to wonder whether chicken entrails were just about as reliable.
All computer output is entirely dependent on input, and as the people who provide the input cannot foretell the future, then neither can the output from computers. Theymnare still no more than wonderfully smart adding-up machines.
I agree Tony.
No-one dismisses the amazing wonders of computer science but it is when the massive historic data it enables one to collate (however brilliant in quantative terms) is used by those with an agenda to attempt to forecast what “will” happen as being beyond any reasonable doubt. As the politicians now tell us “the weight of scientific data (computer aided?) is such that there is no longer an arguement that this is going to happen” and this is therefore our sociological and financial policy to combat it.
Forecasting can only ever be an art form and will never be a science, either with or without computers. The problem is that with the aid of computers we are being told that “this is what will happen” as opposed to this is what could or might happen and that is not good science!
TN [Can you move the foot and mouth discussion sideways as I do not wish it to hijack an excellent discussion on computers]
Philip
I’ll see what I can do tomorrow as this is a subject that I’d really like to know more about.
TonyN: I’ve set up a page for this here , and it can also be accessed form the Pages listing at the top LHS of any window.
Nah, computers are small fry I blame the tobacco industry’s rapid sales increases in the developing world. I often wonder why we blame computers, air travel, leaving devices on standby and yet no one mentions the tobacco related contribution to CO2 and methane in the air…. Oh hang on big Al Gore’s family are tobacco farmers silly me.
Jason
The proprietor of this blog is, at this moment, working on a carbon capture system to fit on his pipe. Funding has been applied for and the editor of Nature is pestering him to let them be the first to publish results of the trial runs. These will show that there will be no additional cost to the user and he has been assured that there is no need to worry about peer review: they’ve taken care of that already.
The ‘phone’s ringing, so must dash. Its probably just Roger Harrabin again.
Now where the hell did I put that bit of damp cotton wool?
Jason #11
You’ll be saying next that Al gore has a co involved in carbon trading…
TonyB
Yes, computers have caused this global warming nonsense but they will also STOP it. Just consider what would be the outcome if, as in the past there were no personal computers only mainframes situated in universities and large companies and the only information available to the general public on any subject was through the media. The computer through the Internet will in the end be the Achilles heel of the AGW movement. There has never been a time when so much information is so readily available at a touch of a button. This is a similar situation as in the past when translating the bible into English was a crime punishable by death. You can`t fool the populous if they have the same information you have.
Rob, Reur 14,
But; First of all; Congratulations TonyN on your lead article!
Rob, this is my first visit to this thread, which at a quick flick-through mostly makes very good sense to me, and I pick-up your final line in 14:
“You can’t fool the populous if they have the same information you have.”
That’s nice, but: where does “the populous” get its information from?
Are you talking of a time in the future when the broader “media” changes its current position?
Or, a time when, maybe after some years of cooling…..
Or…..
Or in the next generation, billions of kids possess laptops, and MIGHT be inquisitive on the alleged AGW, and actually explore the “science”
Unfortunately, I regret:
It seems to me that most of the World’s leading politicians and their mentors, (Including e.g. Al Gore), hold the whip-hand right now, and it will take some overpowering evidence over some years yet for them to change their course. (Yet: without them admitting that maybe they were wrong; such as for example, in the alleged “intelligence” on Iraqi WOMD).
Whoops, it’s starting to get political here, which maybe belongs on that other PETE thread nearby.
Bob
The media is nothing if not fickle. I suspect that it is capable of swinging very rapidly from promoting AGW on the basis of a few warm summers to debunking it because there have been a few cooler years. In the end, it is the public’s appetite for news that will determine the editorial line and, in a recession, is the audience going to want extra helpings of doom and gloom?
TonyN, reur 16, you wrote in part:
I admire your optimism, and hope that it is true of the future, and that that may be aided if the current cooling plateau since 1998 takes-on a more pronounced downhill roll for some years yet.
However, the “Climate Scientists”, can easily explain it all away, such as in: this downward cycle is just momentarily obscuring/delaying the inevitable end of the World!
(Although the models which we, “the climate experts” implicitly depended on, failed to predict the last decade)
Furthermore, many thousands of policymakers around the World, have adopted strong mainstream career-affecting positions, so how can they escape from that? Politicians are not famous for backing down and apologising for their mistakes!
Robin has already made some exquisitely relevant comments on this field on the NT main thread, and is probably far more informed in the socio-political aspects of it than me. So, perhaps you should take my thoughts more casually than his!
Tony, I HOPE that you are right and that the media may eventually sniff-out, that what they have been fed so-far from “the authorities”, is a load of old cobblers!
I’m not a sociologist/anthropologist, but an engineer of the coal-face variety
Bob
As you say, Robin has already pointed to a few signs of changing attitudes even at this early stage, but I suspect that like me he is more familiar with what is happening in the UK than elsewhere.
Although a period of cooler temperatures may influence public opinion, I would expect recession to have a far greater influence on decision makers. In the good times they can afford to indulge in a certain amount of ‘feel good’ expenditure that grabs the headlines, even if the need is not altogether clear. It is likely that 2009 will be a grim year here, and I just don’t think that the electorate is going to tolerate any kind of grandstanding about AGW when this involves measures that will add to their economic woes.
Our government is certainly trying to spin away the abject failure of the EU climate negotiations and Poznan, but that can only work in the short term. It is just a matter of time before more of the media begin to really ask why, if AGW is unquestionable and mitigation urgently required, no action is being taken. And I suspect that it will be the ‘if’ that people will focus on.
Nobody whose hands are shaking when they open their electricity bill is going write a blank cheque for massive capital investment in expensive, untested and unreliable alternative methods of generation unless there is a very, very convincing reason for doing so.
TonyN, in your 18, you wrote in part to me:
This was WRT your observations and perception of your UK “financials”, and it makes good sense to me!
It is interesting to compare that Oz has reportedly been less exposed than the UK, and some other nations, to the “Financial Crisis”. YET here, many of the bold assertions in the political campaign which saw the labour government recently installed, (to drastically cut carbon emissions etc), has somewhat softened. Some weeks before Poznan, I noticed on TV news that the persona of the normally softly smiling Penny Wong, the Oz “climate change” minister, had sagged from being that of a brazenly bold administrator of “the truth“, to that of a noticeably subdued person with very plain face, and very evasive in her answers to any questions.
To me, the body-language was very, very clear… she had changed into being a rather deflated person.
In parallel, the Oz Government, (Kevin Rudd), refused to release its targets until AFTER the Poznan circus. And, I guess you know, the number of 5% reduction has been “White-Papered”, and the Greens etc are a bit cross because they were expecting 20% as a minimum.
It may be of course that local rational scientists like Bob Carter, Chris de Freitus, Ian Plimer, Vincent Gray, and/or others have been able to get the ear of Kevin Rudd…. Who knows?
Whatever, the speculated 20% being reduced to 5%, seems a HUGE mollification, given that the OZ economy is not amongst the worst hit!