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H. von Storch, J. S ¨
undermann, and L. Magaard
Do you think that independently of climate change we are running out of water?
Yes, I think so. It will be a scarce commodity.
Have you anything to do with paleoclimatology?
No, I shied away from it intentionally because to me it was too speculative.
Do you think it will play an important role in the future?
Any part of science that can be thoroughly documented is important.
Will it become fashion?
It has been a fashion. If it will remain a fashion, this is another thing. I don’t have an
opinion on that. It lends itself to lots of speculations and hypotheses, because it is so
difficult to prove anything.
There are many established facts about paleoclimate. No doubt that we know
a lot about the Ice Ages. That is beyond speculation, but if you start to link Ice Ages
and ocean circulation you get into speculation.
Do you believe in these results indicating sudden climate changes?
It depends what you call sudden.
Within decades of years.
Decades it seems to be a little fast. Hundred years I would say is perfectly possible. But
this is again just an opinion. In order to get climate changes you have to start substantial
melting processes or accumulation processes and they do not happen in decades.
When we have what you call truly global monitoring systems, will we get long-range
forecasts with models based on the good knowledge of the dynamical state of the
ocean?
What I said before—models are in their early stages of development. That means we
will get many more surprises out of models, we will get much, much better models
in the future. I am talking about climate models, not necessarily applied models
like ship routing or so. Better and more comprehensive observations will feed better
information to models. I don’t know to what extent the physics of the models need to
be improved, but I think they will be. Science doesn’t give up on these things, there
is always something that can be done better. Our understanding of the processes, for
instance the basic process of ocean–atmosphere interaction, that govern nature will
increase, and therefore the models will improve.
But there are limits to predictability. Many scientists and certainly many outsiders do not want to accept this. People always want to have a certainty about a
prediction. They think if somebody gives them a prediction it should be certain. But
this is by no means so. A correlation of seventy percent means that two times you are
right and one time you are wrong, roughly speaking. So if you make forecasts that
go beyond the dynamical range of the model where turbulence or chaos takes over
H. von Storch, J. S ¨
undermann, and L. Magaard
Do you think that independently of climate change we are running out of water?
Yes, I think so. It will be a scarce commodity.
Have you anything to do with paleoclimatology?
No, I shied away from it intentionally because to me it was too speculative.
Do you think it will play an important role in the future?
Any part of science that can be thoroughly documented is important.
Will it become fashion?
It has been a fashion. If it will remain a fashion, this is another thing. I don’t have an
opinion on that. It lends itself to lots of speculations and hypotheses, because it is so
difficult to prove anything.
There are many established facts about paleoclimate. No doubt that we know
a lot about the Ice Ages. That is beyond speculation, but if you start to link Ice Ages
and ocean circulation you get into speculation.
Do you believe in these results indicating sudden climate changes?
It depends what you call sudden.
Within decades of years.
Decades it seems to be a little fast. Hundred years I would say is perfectly possible. But
this is again just an opinion. In order to get climate changes you have to start substantial
melting processes or accumulation processes and they do not happen in decades.
When we have what you call truly global monitoring systems, will we get long-range
forecasts with models based on the good knowledge of the dynamical state of the
ocean?
What I said before—models are in their early stages of development. That means we
will get many more surprises out of models, we will get much, much better models
in the future. I am talking about climate models, not necessarily applied models
like ship routing or so. Better and more comprehensive observations will feed better
information to models. I don’t know to what extent the physics of the models need to
be improved, but I think they will be. Science doesn’t give up on these things, there
is always something that can be done better. Our understanding of the processes, for
instance the basic process of ocean–atmosphere interaction, that govern nature will
increase, and therefore the models will improve.
But there are limits to predictability. Many scientists and certainly many outsiders do not want to accept this. People always want to have a certainty about a
prediction. They think if somebody gives them a prediction it should be certain. But
this is by no means so. A correlation of seventy percent means that two times you are
right and one time you are wrong, roughly speaking. So if you make forecasts that
go beyond the dynamical range of the model where turbulence or chaos takes over