I'm Blaming it on Climate Change

It sounded like such a good idea. My friend and former boss, now retired, has a home north of Brainerd, Minnesota where she lives on a lake most of the time. I had promised for a few years now we'd stop by and see her there, but it's been tough to match calendars, as she often comes down to her home here in the Twin Cities to check in on parents and family (and probably load up on groceries). Twice before I'd planned flights to Pine River Regional airport in hopes of her invitation to lunch, including transportation to and from the airport. Aside from curiosity about the home, she's also a great cook, so there has been plenty of motivation on my part.

All week the forecast for Friday had been for sunny skies and calm winds, influenced by a high pressure system over Iowa. With continued confirmation Thursday morning, I jumped on the flight schedule and invited my friend and frequent safety pilot, Jim, to join me. He's also retired, and always ready to share a flight for practice and lunch. The forecast was good, we had a good and interesting flight plan, so we agreed on an early departure.

The revised, revised, revised forecast the next morning (it changed every time I looked at it the previous night) called for ceilings at 4600 feet pretty much everywhere early in the morning, improving to more than 5000 feet soon. Any snow would be very light and hardly attract attention or affect visibility. And it would clear by mid morning. By 9:00 a.m., a few of the airports along the route bounced between good, marginal, and plain lousy. We watched their designations change on the digital map with every update. Clouds and snow popped up on the radar randomly. Stepping outside around 9:30 we found the snow falling hard, visibility gone, and ceilings low.

How could the forecasts be so wrong and in such short intervals? The coming hour couldn't be forecasted let alone the rest of the day, let alone the next day, let alone next week. Must be climate change, I thought. Long term forecasts are usually pretty sketchy,  but surely weather guys and gals on television have been pretty good at predicting the next two or three hours relatively accurately, not to mention the aviation meteorologists. My guess is that climate change is making weather much more difficult to predict, and messing with the computer models they rely on.

Come to think of it, that's what leaves me a bit perplexed with the recently released Fourth National Climate Assessment report from the government. In it they make several doomsday environmental, economic, and health predictions based on weather assumptions years into the future. Some of the most sophisticated models ever developed have been developed for weather prediction, and they can't even come close to predicting the environment in a region of the U.S., or a state, or a city, or a flight route for the next day or the next hour. Those models try to account for dozens of variables, which require super computers to crunch through all the calculations. What must capabilities of models predicting years into the future be, what with an exponentially greater number of variables resulting from compounding mega climatological, atmospheric, and environmental variables?

The report makes predictions like the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and half a billion labor hours by 2100. And a 25% reduction in corn production, or a 25% loss in soybean yield in the southern part of the U.S.. And on and on.

I would really appreciate it if those NOAA scientists managing this report could also solve for the weather tomorrow morning for a 120 mile flight to Pine River.