[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]
Pardon the scepticism, but welcome to another visit to climate cloud cuckoo land. This week we’re going to figure out with climate models (of course) how to turn the tables on those nasty floods, hurricanes, mega-heatwaves or any other undesirable weather events you might like to tame. Bring on the small tweaks…
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RIKEN scientists have demonstrated a way to make small tweaks in weather systems as a means to prevent, or at least reduce, the severity of extreme weather events such as torrential rain, says Phys.org.
They did this by taking advantage of the chaos that is inherent to such systems.
Through this work they hope to develop ways to prevent extreme weather events, which have become more common in recent years.
According to Takemasa Miyoshi, the leader of the research group, “It is generally accepted that we need to learn how to predict severe weather events so that we can prepare for them, but it would also be desirable to be able to mitigate the events themselves. That’s what we are interested in achieving.”
His group took on this challenge as part of the Japanese government’s moonshot-millennia program, and in previously published work, they described the possibility of controlling weather by initiating small changes in it as it forms.
At that time, they used the simple Lorenz 63 weather model, which only has a few variables, and showed that it would be possible to induce small perturbations in the system to keep it on one side of a so-called “butterfly pattern.”
Their new study published in Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics goes beyond the simple model. In it, the team adopted the Lorenz 96 model. Essentially, it sets a weather variable for 40 points along a line of latitude around the Earth, and looks at how each of these points changes as it interacts with neighboring points throughout the year.
Approximately once or twice a year, the points show large variations, which correspond to extreme weather events. As part of a control simulation experiment, the members of the team were able to eliminate the extreme events by making small tweaks in a 100-year run of the model.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
More infantile Xbox science.
It was in fact Ed Lorenz that first stated that as a chaotic non-linear system subject to inter alia bifurcation points and extreme sensitivity to initial conditions climate was impossible to model successfully, so anyone who witters about “a 100-year run of the model” is deluded in the extreme and has totally failed to grasp the most basic fundaments of chaos theory.
Edward Lorenz must be spinning in his grave from having his name associated with this buffoonery.
https://news.mit.edu/2008/obit-lorenz-0416
Get one of these 🤓
The obvious point to be made here is that if you go around ‘prodding’ quasi-chaotic developing weather systems in the hope of them eventually becoming less extreme, you might actually achieve the exact opposite. The authors admit to this possibility, right at the end of their paper:
“Thirdly, the potential side effects of the method should also be carefully studied. Indeed, in the current investigations, no negative side effects on the system have been observed, when implementing the CSE. However, such effects should be carefully appraised, in more realistic models. In that respect, in any future investigations, a global assessment of the CSE should be performed. It is certainly challenging but also very interesting. We plan to work on these issues in the future.”
https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/30/117/2023/
Be less foolish to go catch that tiresome Amazon butterfly before it flaps…
It is all very well that they can poke and prod their computer games but it leaves the question of just how they propose doing it in the real world and not producing the exact opposite of what they are trying to achieve – always assuming they can do anything with the real world climate.
Whilst the study is absurdly over-hyped – perhaps because they have to be? – and there’s the usual caveats about models, it’s interesting that a pseudo-chaotic model produces extreme events 1-2 a year. Just shows that extremes are completely natural.
Climate Derangement Syndrome strikes again…
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Looking forward to seeing the details of that scheme 🤓
From Twitter: ‘Has anyone told them the solar panels won’t work if they do this?’