MIT Professor Can’t See Forest For Trees; Confuses Meteorology – Climate – Weather

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26979


Kerry Emanuel
MIT Professor Can’t See Forest For Trees; Confuses Meteorology – Climate – Weather
By Dr. Tim Ball Thursday, August 26, 2010
Recently Kerry Emanuel said, “Why would anybody ask weather forecasters about their opinion on climate? I think it is because there is a hope that I don’t think is justified that ordinary people will confuse weather forecasters with climate scientists.”

Emanuel is a professor of meteorology at MIT with a specialization in atmospheric convection and hurricanes. He is a meteorologist not a climatologist and many weather forecasters are meteorologists. Indeed, his specialty is even more narrow than that required by weather forecasters.



Dr. Emanuel served on the deliberately biased Lord Oxburgh committee investigating Climategate
He argued that hurricane activity would increase with global warming, but is reportedly rethinking that position. His comments were part of a 10-minute documentary about the apparently different views of media meteorologists and climatologists. He also said, “Weather forecasters are in a unique position. I mean if they actually did study the problem, if they actually took the time to really understand it rather than just go to the blogosphere to get their favourite views and rebroadcast them, then I think they could do a lot of good in the world and I think there are some who are doing that to be fair.” Dr. Emanuel served on the deliberately biased Lord Oxburgh committee investigating Climategate, the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). He’s a co-author with Michael Mann and dismissed the leaks as “the well-funded “public relations campaign” to drown out or distort the message of climate science, which he links to “interests where billions, even trillions are at stake…” This “machine … has been highly successful in branding climate scientists as a bunch of sandal-wearing, fruit-juice drinking leftist radicals engaged in a massive conspiracy to return us to agrarian society…” Emanuel’s comments are breathtaking in their naiveté, arrogance and ignorance. They’re made without challenge by mainstream media because they don’t know what is wrong with them.

Meteorology Before Climatology
The confusion is between, meteorology, weather and climate and is largely the result of how they evolved historically. Aristotle wrote a book titled Meteorology that was concerned with processes and phenomenon of the atmosphere. The intent was to understand mechanisms for weather forecasting. This declined until the 19th century when development of instruments such as the thermometer and barometer combined with a desire to measure and understand the constituents of the atmosphere. An early example was discovery of oxygen independently by Scheele in 1773 and Priestley in 1774. Physics became more dominant so that by the beginning of the 20th century it dominated meteorology. In Canada for example, to become a government weather forecaster a Masters degree in Physics was required. After which, a brief in–house course taught weather forecasting. There was virtually no climate instruction. The pattern was similar around the world.

Even today few people know about climatology or the difference between weather and climate. When I began public speaking I started talks with a definition of climatology. First I told how, when speaking about the weather to a class studying the Fur Trade, the teacher introduced me as a climatologist. Immediately a hand went up and the young student wanted to know how many mountains I’d climbed. People laughed because it was obviously wrong, but most didn’t know the correct answer. Mark Twain knew the difference when he said climate is what you expect, weather is what you get, but for most, the weather, meteorology as physics of the atmosphere, had taken over.

Climate is derived from the Greek word klimat that refers to the angle of the Sun or inclination. They understood how this created three different climate regions, cold, temperate and hot. These were average conditions because climate is the average weather over time or in a region. The angle of the sun is a major factor in determining the climate, but it is only one of a myriad of factors. When Sir Francis Drake set out for the west coast of North America he expected to find a climate similar to that in England because it was equal in latitude so the sun’s angle was similar. They didn’t know how the ocean currents transported vast amounts of heat toward the Pole to alter the pattern of climate in Western Europe.

There was a brief flurry of interest in climate at the end of the 19th century as the concept of climatic determinism was embedded in environmental determinism. It held that people were a product of the climatic region in which they were born and lived. It reached an extreme with Ellsworth Huntington and publications like Civilization and Climate in 1915. His work evolved from Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie published in two volumes published (1882 and 1891). All this provided an intellectual framework for white supremacy in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Ironically, during the war Hubert Lamb working as a meteorologist and gradually became aware of changing climate in historic times. He wanted to improve the forecasts and spent time studying historical records and by 1972 had established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia. He wrote, “When the Climatic Research Unit was founded, it was clear that the first need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.” Only one other climate research establishment in the world at the time was Reid Bryson’s Center for Climatic Research at Madison, Wisconsin. CRU had insufficient funds because nobody was interested in climate at that time.

A major problem was the growth of specialization in academia, but climate is a generalist topic. It’s the average weather that is the product of a multitude of factors from cosmic radiation from deep space, to geothermal heat from within the Earth, and everything in between. Meteorology is a subset of the weather like oceanography and each of these have subsets. One of them involves the specialized tropical convection and hurricane research of Emanuel. He only studies one piece of a very complex puzzle. It explains why he incorrectly predicted increased hurricane activity due to global warming. As Henri Poincare said, “Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house.” Someone also said about economists that. “They try to predict the tide by measuring one wave.” Climate science does the same thing and Emanuel sides with the argument that the one wave is CO2.