Tim Ball on: ‚Generalization, Specialization and Climatology’.
Does it mean he explains what climate is?
Since the 1970th sciences uses the word CLIMATE excessively. Surprisingly, the Convention on Climate Change, 1992 has no definition of the term climate at all, but defines “climate change” and “climate system”. These terms contribute little to understanding the meaning of climate. Detail discussed at: http://www.whatisclimate.com/a110-what-is-climate-operable-from-september.html
More than two decades later Tim Ball, who oppose the consensus scientific opinion of significant anthropogenic global warming since long took on the terminology surrounding the term “climate”, either fails to say what climate is, he only refers to climatology and climate science. That is utterly insufficient to understand, respectively enshrines a definition for the term “climate”. Read what is a recent post at WUWT (29:June2015; Ref.1 below) offers as explanation:
Climatology is the study of weather patterns of a place or region, or the change of weather patterns over time. Climate science is the study of one component piece of climatology. The analogy I’ve used for decades is that climatology is a puzzle of thousands of pieces; climate science is one piece of the puzzle. A practical approach to assembling the puzzle is to classify pieces into groups.
The problem is obvious, what is a “weather pattern”? Tim Ball is silent on it. Is it meaningless? That depends, for laymen not, because it is what they experience every day, for academic work it is utterly nonsense. Why?
· Weather is the state of the atmosphere. Weather, seen from an anthropological perspective, is something all humans in the world constantly experience through their senses, at least while being outside. There are socially and scientifically constructed understandings of what weather is, what makes it change, the effect it has on humans in different situations, etc. Therefore, weather is something people often communicate about. (wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather)
· Pattern is something that happens in a regular and repeated way. (merriam-webster dictionary)
Indeed, also weather — as a state of the atmosphere- is a laymen term people often communicate about. That is a very different sphere form scientific research and clear and correct scientific communication. In an earlier post Tim Ball mentioned (25. Feb. 2014- Ref.2 belwo) that Theophrastus (around 300 BC), a student of Aristotle’s, wrote a book setting out the first rules for weather forecasting recording over 200 empirical indicator. .Although Tim Ball admitted that “we haven’t come very far since. Indeed, I would argue we have regressed“, he use a climate terminology, which is similar superficial as used by main stream weather science.
Dr. Timothy F. Ball (born November 5, 1938) claimed that he was the first person to receive a PhD in climatology in Canada. In 2018 Tim Ball undertook another try to get a grip on the term “Climate”, although more thoughtful, he again failed to understand the issue, and the seriousness of the grand failure of sciences when using the word “climate”.
Concerning Tim Ball’s essays, for more details see: https://oceansgovernclimate.com/2018/11/ ; in the following is only the title and the first paragraph:
“On the Struggle to Visualize Climate; The narrow view of climate science is like the dismissed thesis that the earth is flat.”
The two titles (to this post) are taken from a recent essay “Most People Live in a Flat Earth and Struggle to Visualize Climate and a Three-Dimensional Atmosphere.” by Dr. Tim Ball at WUWT on 04 Nov 2018. The assessment by Tim Ball that for to many people the earth is still flat is a good start to discuss deficiencies in climate change matters. Focusing merely on the atmosphere, is a much to narrow view: “they look at weather maps but are unable to visualize the 3-D atmosphere.” But is this view not also too much restrictive? Is not the ocean the media which makes climate?………………..cont. at: https://oceansgovernclimate.com/2018/11/
Although Tim Ball, who retired from teaching in 1996, was a big figure in science, he missed to understand the link between ocean-weather –climate, and subsequently failed to to introduce a sufficient and academically workable definition for ‘climate’.
Water is the driving force of all nature
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 -1519).
Ref. Links:
1___WUWT (29:June2015): http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/28/generalization-specialization-and-climatology/
2___Tim Ball (25. Feb.2014): http://drtimball.com/2014/government-weather-and-climate-forecasts-are-failures/
