What role mathematics play in making predictions about GLOBAL WARMING?...HELP..please?..thank you?

Question

please help me guys....thank you

Answer 1

Hard to give a specific answer as there are literally thousands of ways in which mathematics is involved. Perhaps a couple of the more obvious ones are in the areas of climate modelling and data analysis.

Both of these areas are incredibly complicated, involve vast amounts of data and equations that often have hundreds of variables. Some of the equations, when written down, are three pages long.

Climatologists and mathematicians often work in collaboration with each other (along with other professionals from a variety of disciplines). A climate scientist may be an expert when it comes to the climate but needs the skills and logical processing possessed by the mathematician to make sense of, and accurately process, the data.

A skilled mathematician is not imperative when it comes to making predictions about global warming but their expertice certainly speeds things up and makes life considerably easier.

Answer 2

1. Math is the language of science. Sometimes scientists will be discussing a situation or a problem and another scientist will say "Can you express this algebraically?" So math helps in discussing and explaining issues and problems.

2. Math is used in computer models of climate change known as General Circulation Models or GCMs. A good many global warming predictions (more often called "forecasts") come from these GCMs.. Unfortunately, these predictions are not very reliable. Predictions of regional climate on a seasonal basis are wrong more often than they are right. This has been in the news. Peer reviewed papers sometimes discuss this.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027654.shtml

One of the reasons these models fail so often is because climatologists have not bothered to learn the proper methods of scientific forecasting. J. Scott Armstrong is one of the leading scientists in this field. He founded the peer reviewed journal on forecasting and wrote the book on it. http://principlesofforecasting.com/

After auditing the forecasting principles used by the IPCC to predict future global climate, he found 79 violations of scientific principles. You can read the paper about the audit here.
http://forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/WarmAudit31.pdf

Orrin Pilkey and his daughter wrote a book called "Useless Arithmetic" and talked about all of the failures of computer modeling to model nature. In the book, Pilkey writes that the IPCC does a good job of explaining the uncertainties about their predictions in the science portion of the IPCC report, but for some reason those uncertainties are never expressed in the media reports. Check it out on Amazon on your favorite book website.

3. Another key area math is involved is called statistics. This is used to analyze the data gathered to learn if it is significant or not. Unfortunately, climate scientists have not proven to be very good with statistics. This is especially true among the dendro and paleoclimatolgists. Take Michael Mann for example. His paper claiming it is warmer now than at any time in the last 1000 years was proven wrong. Apparently, he hid results that disagreed with his conclusions which is considered very unethical by scientists. You can read about it in the Dutch science magazine article called "Kyoto protocol based on flawed statistics."
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/Climate_L.pdf

Answer 3

ron c said it all