Author: postMigrator

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“We have to try to model an immensely complex
system all the way from the tropical rainforest,
the oceans, the northern hemisphere forests, the
soil – and we have no fundamental equations to do
that with,” he says.

“When we are modelling the physics of the oceans
and the atmosphere, we do have some fundamental
equations.

“We don’t have those for the living parts of the system.”
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BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7381250.stm
Published: 2008/05/06 08:12:52 GMT

Climate prediction: No model for success
By Roger Harrabin
Environment analyst, BBC News

Pier Luigi Vidale smiles fondly as he gazes at
the image unfolding on his screen.

It is a rare and beautiful view of Planet Earth.

Curlicues of cloud formations swirl around the
Antarctic at the bottom of the screen as if
captured by time-lapse photography.

The image resembles a view of the Earth from space, stretched full frame.

But a small yellow ball scudding along the bottom
of the screen hints at another story.

The ball is the Sun, heating the surface as it
passes and provoking a daily puff of cloud from
the Amazon rainforest in this computer-generated
climate model.

The animation comes from research led by Dr
Vidale at Reading University’s Walker Institute.

It is designed to provide long-term data to help
scientists distinguish between heating trends and
natural climatic fluctuations.

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“Research by  definition is done at the frontier of ignorance. Like
nearly everyone described in these essays, Callendar had to use
intuition as well as logic to draw any conclusions at all from the
murky data and theories at his disposal. Like nearly everyone, he
argued for conclusions that mingled the true with the false, leaving
it to later workers to peel away the bad parts. While he could not
prove that global warming was underway, he had given reasons to
reconsider the question. We owe much to Callendar’s courage. His
claims rescued the idea of global warming from obscurity and thrust
it into the marketplace of scientific ideas. Not everyone dismissed
his claims. Their very uncertainty attracted scientific curiosity.”

Excerpt from The Discovery of Global Warming, by Spencer Weart, an
excellent book available free from the American Institute of Physics:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

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“If you are planting long-lived plants like trees then you might want
to choose a species that can cope with hotter, drier, summers and
warmer, wetter, winters,” said Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s head of
climate change. The decision to take the message to gardeners
reflects concern among researchers that the public has still not
understood the threat of climate change.”
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Times Online
From The Sunday Times
May 4, 2008

Park the mower: climate change to kill off lawns
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

THE Met Office is to warn gardeners to plan for a
warmer climate by cultivating drought-tolerant
plants such as palms, olives and Mediterranean
herbs and to resign themselves to the death of
the traditional lawn.

It believes this year will be one of the hottest on record.

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