The narrow view of climate science is like the dismissed
thesis that the earth is flat.

Post 09 November 2018

The two titles to this post are taken from a recent essay “Most People Live in a Flat Earth and Struggle to Visualize Climate and a Three-Dimensional Atmosphere.” by Dr. Tim Ball at WUWT on 04 Nov 2018. The assessment by Tim Ball that for to many people the earth is still flat, is a good start to discuss deficiencies in climate change matters.  Focusing merely on the atmosphere, is a much to narrow view: “they look at weather maps but are unable to visualize the 3-D atmosphere.”  But is this view not also too much restrictive? Is not the ocean the media which makes climate? Here at www.oceansgorvernclimate.com we think the discussion should be considerable wider, as all what concerns about weather and climate is primarily a water question. This issue was already prominent, long ago, by Leonardo da Vinci (1452 -1519).

Leonardo da Vinci’s musings on the nature of the world and what makes it tick is shown in the exhibition “Water as Microscope of Nature: Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Codex Leicester,’ ” at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence since 30^th October last week. He was convinced that the science of waters would enable him to reveal the organization and functioning of nature. The exhibition offers many hindsight how he viewed: water. Famous is his saying:  Water is the driving force of all nature. And that brings in the term climate.

To ‘visualize climate’ it is necessary to tell the people what climate is. In the mentioned essay (above) Tim Ball merely offers this explanation:

“The idea of a differing angle of the sun is critical to understanding climate and climate change. This is why the word climate derives from the Greek word for inclination. It is also why the Greeks were able to identify three climate zones, the Torrid, Temperate, and Frigid”

Actually he wanted to provide further explanation to a previous essay at WUWT on 14^th October 2018: “Climate Research in the IPCC Wonderland: What Are We Really Measuring and Why Are We Wasting All That Money?”, where he discussed in detail a 2006-paper “Does a Global Temperature Exist”, assuming: “that weather forecasting has not improved despite all the satellite and computer models and  that climate forecasting has deteriorated, despite  the trillions of dollars spent on computer models, government weather agencies, useless research, and unnecessary energy and environment policies based on their failed work.”

As a reminder, the subject is about global air temperature, and whether they increase globally. Air temperatures are part of local and global weather, but they are not weather. Temperatures are numbers or indicate more warm or more cold. By IPCC definition (Glossary 2018):

Global warming is an increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) averaged over a 30-year period, relative to 1850-1900 unless otherwise specified.  For periods shorter than 30 years, global warming refers to the estimated average temperature over the 30 years centred on that shorter period, accounting for the impact of any temperature fluctuations or trend within those 30 years.

There should be no room to use the term climate, which means traditionally “average weather”, respectively numerical data, of several dozen different atmospheric conditions or observations. Talking about “Visualize Climate and a Three-Dimensional Atmosphere” is of no help, to improve the meaningless use of terms as: climate, climate change, climate system a.s.o..  Leonardo da Vinci indicated the direction: that water matters. When saying that water is the driver of nature it stands simultaneously for the oceans make climate, because they are covering more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and containing about 97 percent of its surface water, and  the ocean stores vast amounts of energy in the form of heat.

That the assessment of global warming has deficiencies is due to the fact, as indicated by Tim Ball, that the coverage numbers temperature data are meaningless because there are only weather stations for about 15% of the Earth’s surface. There are virtually no stations for 70% of the world that is oceans, [of the continents about 80% are mountains, forest, desert and, grassland], see Fig.3 above. But the relevance of the oceans on long -term weather conditions (climate) is extreme higher than the mere surface coverage of 70%. With an average depth of about 3,688 meters (12,100 ft), only mere three meters of the water column is in the atmosphere, resulting in a ratio of 1000:1.  Presumably Leonardo da Vinci would suggest to us to struggle to visualize all global water in any possible dimension and impact from and on human kind. Ignoring it is as if claiming the earth is flat.