Abstract
A Google search for the keyword ‘climate’ on a cold summer day in August 2010 delivered more than 150 million links in 0.23 s, and ‘climate change’ brought another 58 million. Obviously it is no problem to find floods of information about these topics on the net, yet understanding the scientific concept of climate and climate modelling is not so easy. The trouble with ‘climate’ starts when it is mixed up with the idea of weather, and when extreme weather events and short-term trends in temperature or precipitation are interpreted as effects of climate change. Usually, these interpretations are linked to an individual’s memory of experiences in childhood and other periods of life. But the trouble results not from this individual definition, which does not accord with the World Meteorological Organization’s official definition of climate as the statistics of weather. The trouble is raised by the scientific concept of climate as a mathematical construct that cannot be experienced directly. This problem is hitting science now that socio-political demands are coming into play. For responding to such demands, science has to break down its statistical and general concepts into individual and local conclusions, but this is—at the moment at least—not possible. The reason lies in the top-down approach of modern science, which uses globally valid equations to achieve increasingly higher resolution. The great challenge for meteorology during the next years and decades will be to translate statistical and general results into individual and local knowledge. Or in other words, science has to connect its global view with local circumstances. Regional modelling and downscaling are just the beginning, although these methods are still far removed from any particular individual or local view of a particular city or area. Of course, one can ask why humans do not simply get used to the scientific concept of climate. But when concrete environmental activities are required, individual needs and local effects play the main role, not the annual mean global temperature.
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Notes
- 1.
“Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the average weather, or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period for averaging these variables is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. The relevant quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system”. (IPCC 2007a, p. 249).
- 2.
“The first quantitative classification of world climates was made by the German scientist Wladimir Koeppen in 1900. Koeppen was trained as a plant physiologist and realized that plants could serve as synthesizers of the many climatic elements. He chose as symbols for his classification the five vegetation groups of the late nineteenth-century French botanist De Candolle, which was based on the climate zones of the Greeks: A, the plants of the torrid zone; C, the plants of the temperate zone; D and E, the plants of the frigid zone, while the B group represented plants of the dry zone. A second letter in the classification expressed the moisture factor (an Af climate is tropical and rainy)” (Sanderson 1999, p. 672; see also Koeppen 1936).
- 3.
The system approach was introduced into science in nineteenth-century thermodynamics by the physicist Nicolas L.S. Carnot. He envisioned the relations between heat and work done by heat in an ideal heat engine, i.e., in a closed body. In 1824, his experiments led him to the following theorem: “When a gas changes in volume without change of temperature the quantities of heat which it absorbs or gives up are in arithmetical progression when the increments or reductions of volume are in geometrical progression” (Carnot 1824, p. 28).
- 4.
The relevant electromagnetic spectrum of radiation ranges from short-wave radiation emitted by the sun mainly as visible light (about 400–780 nm), to long-wave radiation emitted by the Earth and the atmosphere, mainly as heat (infrared light about 780 nm–1 mm). According to Wien’s law the wavelength of emitted radiation is indirectly proportional to the absolute temperature. Thus, solar radiation is in the short-wave range (the sun’s temperature ~5,800 K) and the infrared radiation emitted by the surface or the atmosphere is in the long-wave (or thermal) range. The increase in wavelength goes along with a decrease in energy.
- 5.
Albedo is the fraction of reflected solar radiation to the total incoming solar radiation; A = 1 means all radiation is reflected.
- 6.
Because about 90%of the atmosphere’s mass is located in the troposphere—from the ground up to an altitude of 16 km (about 1,000–100 hPa)—most circulation takes place here.
- 7.
A seminal study on The Discovery of Global Warming and a substantial bibliography is provided by Spencer Weart: URL: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/bib.htm (Weart 2003).
- 8.
Keeling’s measurements were supported by Revelle, who “wanted to make sure that man’s ‘vast geophysical experiment’ would be properly monitored and its results analyzed” (Keeling 1978, p. 38).
- 9.
Models in this sense are defined as the concretizations of a theory. This so-called semantic view on models is widespread in the theory of science (Fraassen van 1980).
- 10.
There is an increasing body of historical studies on meteorology (see for example Friedman 1989; Fleming 1990, 1998; Nebeker 1995; Harper 2008). A Bibliography of Recent Literature in the History of Meteorology is provided by Brant Vogel (Vogel 2009). A review of The International Bibliography of Meteorology: Revisiting a Nineteenth-Century Classic is given by James R. Fleming (Fleming 2009).
- 11.
In 1597 Galileo Galilei developed a water thermometer which was advanced by Daniel Fahrenheit’s mercury thermometer in 1714. In 1643 Evangelista Torricelli developed the barometer, and in the eighteenth century Horace-Bénédict de Saussure invented the hair tension hygrometer when he discovered that hair under tension expands relative to the surrounding humidity.
- 12.
In 1781 the Societas Meteorological Palatina, located in Mannheim, operated 39 weather observation stations around the globe. Because it took more than 100 years to introduce the standard of the Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 (and Coordinated Universal Time in 1972) to globally synchronize measurements, the Societas introduced the ‘Mannheim hour’ as a global standard for time measurements. By using measurement devices of identical construction for measurements recorded simultaneously all over the world, at 7, 14, and 21 Mannheim hour, they set a standard for meteorological measurements that would fulfill even today’s requirements (Wege and Winkler 2005).
- 13.
The disastrous Royal Charter storm in 1859, which caused the loss of over 800 lives and the steam clipper Royal Charter, inspired Fitzroy to develop charts for weather forecasts and storm warnings.
- 14.
- 15.
George Stokes conceived the motion of a fluid differently than Claude Navier had done. He developed a method that “does not necessarily require the consideration of ultimate molecules [as Navier did]. Its principle feature consists in eliminating from the relative motion of the fluid about any particular point the relative motion which corresponds to a certain motion of rotation, and examining the nature of the relative motion which remains” (Stokes 1845, p. 185).
- 16.
This claim implied that vortices cannot be created or destroyed in such idealized fluids (Helmholtz 1858). But the appearance and disappearance of vortices was a common phenomenon to meteorologists. Therefore the idealized theoretical and mathematical models of hydrodynamics were not applicable to meteorology.
- 17.
Bjerknes’ concept did not appear out of nowhere, e.g., the meteorologist Sir William N. Shaw had derived equations from physical laws for meteorological problems. In 1866 Julius Hann had already used thermodynamics to explain the warm, dry winds from the Alps. In the mid-1990s the physicists J.R. Schütz and Ludwig Silberstein also extended Helmholtz’s vorticity equations to the case of a compressible fluid (Thrope et al. 2003). In 1901 Max Margules calculated the change of pressure within columns of differing temperature, and in 1902 Felix Exner computed a prognosis of air pressure. Bjerknes’ outstanding achievement was to consolidate the fragmented field of dynamic meteorology on a sustainable basis of theoretical, practical and computational research (Gramelsberger 2009).
- 18.
The paper was published in the Meteorologische Zeitschrift in January 1904–entitled “Das Problem der Wettervorhersage, betrachtet von Standpunkt der Mechanik und Physik”. An English translation is provided in the Meteorologische Zeitschrift of December 2009 (Bjerknes 2009).
- 19.
While hydrodynamics deals with the motion of fluids, thermodynamics studies the energy conversion between heat and mechanical work. “Indeed it can be cut so easily that theoretical hydrodynamicists have always done so in order to avoid any serious contact with meteorology” (Bjerknes 2009, p. 665).
- 20.
Bjerknes had to give up his ambitious program and successfully developed a more practical way of weather forecasting when he moved from Leipzig to Bergen in 1917. He improved the methods of synoptic meteorology based on an advanced theory of cyclogenesis (the polar front theory), which he had developed together with his son Jacob and others, now called the ‘Bergen school’ (Bjerknes 1919; Friedman 1989).
- 21.
In his study The Dawn of Fluid Dynamics Michael Eckert described the situation dramatically: “More than a 100 years after Bernoulli’s and Euler’s work, hydrodynamics and hydraulics were certainly no longer regarded as synonymous designations for a common science. Hydrodynamics had turned into a subject matter for mathematicians and theoretical physicists—hydraulics became technology. Aerodynamics, too, became divorced from its theoretical foundations in hydrodynamics. […] In all these areas of application, air resistance was the central problem. Aerodynamic theory could not provide a single formula that accounted for the various practical goals” (Eckert 2006, pp. 25, 26).
- 22.
“In 1896 a textbook on ballistics lists in chronological order 20 different ‘laws of air resistance’, each one further divided into various formulae for different ranges of velocity. […] No physical theory could provide a logical framework for justifying these empirical ‘laws’” (Eckert 2006, p. 26).
- 23.
“The ENIAC was an electronic calculator that inaugurated the era of digital computing in the United States. Its purpose was to calculate firing tables for the U.S. Army, a task that involved the repetitive solution of complex mathematical expressions” (Ceruzzi 1998, p. 15). ENIAC was built between 1943 and 1946 at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Herman Goldstine was the responsible U.S. Army coordinator and J. G. Brainerd was the project manager. In 1947 ENIAC was delivered to the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the U.S. Army in Aberdeen, Maryland.
- 24.
Stanislav Ulam described the situation at Los Alamos in 1943: “The blackboard was filled with very complicated equations that you could encounter in other forms in other offices. This sight scared me out of my wits: looking at these I felt that I should never be able to contribute even an epsilon to the solution of any of them. But during the following days, to my relief, I saw that the same equations remained on the blackboard. I noticed that one did not have to produce immediate solutions. […] Little as I already knew about partial differential equations or integral equations, I could feel at once that there was no hope of solution by analytical work that could yield practical answers to the problems that appeared” (Ulam and von Neumann 1980, p. 95).
- 25.
Fitting the irregularly distributed measurement data into the regular grids of simulations is still a challenging practice for meteorology.
- 26.
“Richardson ascribed the unrealistic value of pressure tendency to errors in the observed winds which resulted in spuriously large values of calculated divergence. This is true as far as it goes. However, the problem is deeper […] A subtle state of balance exists in the atmosphere between the pressure and wind fields, ensuring that the high frequency gravity waves have much smaller amplitude than the rotational part of the flow. Minor errors in observational data can result in a disruption of the balance, and cause large gravity wave oscillations in the model solution” (Lynch 1999, p. 15).
- 27.
Christine Harper reconstructed the introduction of computational meteorology in the U.S. between 1919 and 1955 and the major influence of Scandinavian meteorologists in her instructive study Weather by the Numbers (Harper 2008). A study on Early Operational Numerical Weather Prediction Outside the USA is given by Andres Persson (Persson 2005a, b).
- 28.
These early models created a family tree of GCMs (Edwards 2000). Or in other words, today’s GCMs are rooted in an evolution of five decades of coding and reusing the same primitive equations of the dynamic core again and again.
- 29.
Discretization treats a continuous problem as a discrete one and therefore results in a discretization error. Numerical computation is an approximation which approximates the unknown solution using iterative methods that are stopped after a certain number of iteration steps. Therefore the computation results in a truncation error. Furthermore, numbers in computers are represented by a limited number of digits, which creates rounding errors.
- 30.
In terms of computing time, this means that Charney and his team needed 33 days to compute their prognoses, mainly because ENIAC had to be set up by physically plugging in the operations. Around 100,000 punch cards were needed to carry out the computations and to store the intermediate and final results. Nevertheless, compared to manual computing capacities, ENIAC was an unbelievably fast computer. When in the 1970s George Platzman, who had conceived the diagram of the operations on ENIAC, repeated the computation for one of the 24-h ENIAC prognoses on an IBM 5110 PC, the actual computation time took 1 hour. A current laptop would need milliseconds for this simple model (Lynch 2008).
- 31.
In the 1970s the computation of the dynamic core was transferred from the Gaussian grid into the spectral space for stability reasons (Bourke 1974). Currently, the dynamic core of some GCMs is being re-coded on icosahedral grids, which better model the spherical shape of Earth.
- 32.
Interception means that particles stick together due to small stochastical motion (Brownian motion) if the distance between an ice crystal and a snowflake is smaller than the radius of the crystal.
- 33.
Very recently, the actual state of the ocean has been used to start transient climate simulations. This much more realistic approach has become possible due to the new measurement network, ARGO, which since the year 2000 has continuously sounded the uppermost 2 km of the oceans by means of buoys and floats to measure the profiles of temperature, currents and salinity. These measurement data are assimilated to generate three-dimensional fields of the ocean’s parameters, which then serve as an initial field for model simulations.
- 34.
The WMO website provides an overview of milestones since 1875, when the first International Meteorological Conference was held in Brussels. URL: http://www.wmo.int/pages/about/milestones_en.html. The Swiss website ProClim offers a research information service of international environmental organizations. URL: http://www.proclim.ch
- 35.
The Convention on Climate Change was negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, followed by the annual Conferences of the Parties (COP) since 1995. In November and December 2011 the COP-17/MOP-7 will take place in South Africa.
- 36.
The term ‘big science’ was coined for large programs in science which emerged in industrial nations during and after World War II: for instance, the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb led by the United States, involving more than 130,000 people at 30 research sites. These military-based programs are termed as ‘closed big science’, while meteorology is characterized as an ‘open big science’, since free access to data and computer codes is provided to researchers worldwide (Halfmann and Schützenmeister 2009).
- 37.
“The data assimilation system during reanalysis is as far as possible kept unchanged. The analysis is multivariate, and a 6-h forecast, the background, provides the most accurate a priori estimate for the analysis. Each analysis represents a state of the model after iteratively adjusting the background towards observations in a way that is optimal, given estimates of the accuracy of the background and observations. The differences between background, analysis and observations are archived for each value offered to the analysis. In addition the physical processes are ‘recorded’ during the model integration from one analysis to the next, the time interval during which they should be closest to the truth. All the synoptic and asynoptic observations, describing the instantaneous weather, control the data assimilation and the quality of its products over the period” (ECMWF Newsletter 2004, p. 2).
- 38.
The GOS, for instance, collects data from 1,000 land stations, 1,300 upper-air stations, 4,000 ships, about 1,200 drifting and 200 moored buoys, and 3,000 ARGOS profiling floats, as well as 3,000 commercial aircraft, five operational polar-orbiting meteorological satellites, six geostationary meteorological satellites, and several environmental research and development satellites. GAW coordinates data from 26 global stations, 410 regional stations, and 81 contributing stations to produce high-quality data on selected variables of the chemical composition of the atmosphere (WMO 2010).
- 39.
Free access to data is not always practiced in science. In genetics, for instance, many data sources are commercialized. This can seriously hinder scientific progress. Fortunately, meteorology and climate science are dominated by free access to data and models as well as to computer and observation resources.
- 40.
As long as a single assertion can be inferred from a theory and clearly tested by observation or experiment in order to validate or falsify the theory, prediction is a practical tool for science to test its knowledge basis. Based on this practicability, Popper differentiated two forms of predictions: ‘conditional scientific predictions’ (if X takes place, then Y will take place) and ‘unconditional scientific prophecies’ (Y will take place). The conditional prediction is the type used in rational forecasting applied to a system that changes over time.
- 41.
“As is well known, the calculation of the movement of three points that influence each other according to a law as simple as Newton’s already far exceeds the means of today’s mathematical analysis. There is evidently no hope of knowing the movements of all points of the atmosphere which are influenced by much more complicated interactions” (Bjerknes 2009, p. 665).
- 42.
Rob Swart et al. suggest a consistent vocabulary of confidence levels and probabilities across all working groups, special training for IPCC authors, a legitimate view of different approaches, and a supportive articulation of the nature and origins of uncertainties for the reader (Swart et al. 2009, p. 3 et seq.).
- 43.
Bray and von Storch conducted an analysis exploring “how climate scientists perceive the products of their efforts, as a projection or as a prediction” (Bray and von Storch 2009, p. 538). The interesting result of this analysis is that about two thirds of the 283 responses are cautious about their outcome, calling them projections, not predictions. However, there is still some confusion, with “approximately 29% of the respondents associating probable with projections and approximately 20% of the respondents associating possible with prediction” (Bray and von Storch 2009, p. 541).
- 44.
Emissions inventories are developed not only for future scenarios, but also for the past. Inventories for IPCC range from the year 1860 to 2100. Emissions inventories covering the past are provided, for instance, by the Global Emissions Inventory Activity (GEIA) project (GEIA 2010).
- 45.
Model comparisons are also performed to test the system behaviour and to assess the ability of climate models to simulate the trends of the recent past (1860–2000) and past climate states. Model intercomparisons performed by PCMDI are the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP), the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), the Seasonal Prediction Model Intercomparison Project (SMIP), and the Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project (PMIP). In addition, more than 40 international model intercomparisons have been arranged by different institutions to test the behaviour of sub-models or of specific aspects of climate models, and a great number of publications has emerged from these intercomparisons (see also Sect. 2.4).
- 46.
The median is the value which separates the upper half of a sample from the lower half. Here the median is calculated for any variable at any grid-point.
- 47.
This classification was provided by the climate modeller and satellite data expert Stephan Kinne in a personal communication in 2008. He emphasized that accuracy is not an abstract problem. The accuracy necessarily depends on the problem investigated. Sometimes large uncertainty is acceptable, if qualitative pattern information is needed. Nonetheless, quantifying real uncertainty is extremely important. Modelling is better served by data on the real uncertainty range than averages. Close collaborations among data-groups as well as between data-groups and modelling-groups are needed to provide more accurate products, to establish the real uncertainties and to help prevent the misuse and misinterpretation of data.
- 48.
Wolfgang Lucht and Rajendra K. Pachauri refer to mankind’s impact as the ‘mental component of the Earth system’ and an “uncontrolled coevolution of the mental, physical, and biological spheres [that] has increased over the last decades” (Lucht and Pachauri 2004, p. 343).
- 49.
Mike Hulme refers here to Mary Douglas’ and Aaron Wildavsky’s cultures of risk (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982).
- 50.
Perhaps the ‘tolerant view’ can be compared to the UNFCCC’s ‘precautionary principle’, which advocates that it is better to be safe than sorry and therefore advises the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions “that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (UNFCCC 1992, Article 2).
- 51.
Andries F. Hof et al. studied the vast uncertainties and critical assumptions involved in cost-benefit analysis and conclude that the ‘optimal targets’, which range from 520 to 800 ppmv, are caused by differences in value judgments and uncertainties about the cost of mitigation and damage (Hof et al. 2008).
- 52.
Optimal for whom? The problem is that some regions are more vulnerable to global climate change than others.
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Gramelsberger, G., Feichter, J. (2011). Modelling the Climate System: An Overview. In: Gramelsberger, G., Feichter, J. (eds) Climate Change and Policy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17700-2_2
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