Climate Models -vs- Climate Reality: diverging or just a dip?

Who would like to bet the following outcomes on the models being correct.
[1] Higher taxes.
[2] Increased energy costs.
[3] Greater Government control.
[4] Biofuel induced food price increases.
[5] Intermittent electricity supplies.
[6] Increased export of manufacturing to other countries (i.e China).
[7] Reduced jobs as business costs increase.
Of course, if the models have no basis in reality and AGW Catastrophism is an artefact of modelling – then the above outcomes can be avoided by pretty much doing nothing.

The climate models are just an exercise in trend fitting. They have no predictive power over and above the trend.
Its clear that the warming trend of the late 20th century is over. And because CO2 levels (or at least CO2 emissions) continue to rise, it’s also clear CO2 wasn’t the cause of the late 20th century warming.
Excellent work Lucia.

I think the models are demonstrational… 😉 and not based on facts. It’s based on the fantasy that more CO2 = steady rising temperatures. In the real world, rising CO2 doesn’t = rising temperature… but just the opposite as the temperatures have been declining since 2004 as CO2 levels have increased.

Philip B says –
It’s clear that the warming trend of the late 20th century is over
Well….O.K. if all you mean is that it’s now the 21st century and therefore any warming in the 20th century is over (!)
I’m sure that’s not what you mean, but I don’t think that such observations are worth much. Yes, they state the fact. But that doesn’t mean a great deal all by itself.
I think that it is just not possible to draw general conclusions on the basis of just 9 years.
To get anything meaningful you need to have a look at records which are much more extensive. Then the maxima and minima of trends and their sign, can be discerned accurately.
Of course, the same thing has to be pointed out to AGW proponents who point to a few years around 1998, or rabbit on about the Arctic ice losses in a particular year compared with the previous couple of years. For me that is all interesting but the excitement it seems to generate is rather vacuous.
Having said all of that, nevertheless it is true that the “global average” has not risen in the current decade and that is interesting when compared with the models.

It’s interesting that the divergence that began in 2006 fits perfectly with the flattening of the sea level graph at CU. I wonder what caused the march spike in Mauna Loa CO2. Since recent studies show simultaneous rises in CO2 in both the NH and SH, perhaps it is tied to recent volcanic activity above and below sea level.

“Have you seen this last bunch of scaremongering that has spread in the web?”
Unfortunately yes, and also with National Geographic.
NG has been a staple of reading for my whole life, a big influence fostered by my grand dad.
A most informative, scientific and exciting digest that has ever been spawned. Most with world class professional photographs, pictures that build an adventure and surpasses the imagination sometimes.
Sadly, I never thought in a lifetime, that one day(one year ago) I’d be forced to send out a E(hate)-mail to the office of National Geographic denouncing the unscientific/fraudulent/bias approach their publications taken in the last few years.
I expected more from this now so called natural scientific journal, it seems a contrary view is not to be had anywhere these days?
AGW science consisting of NO facts, NO evidence, NO out of control warming and as of the last 10 years, this last year has been as cool and ice building as 1979. The year they started measuring from satellite and stopped caring about real temperatures and the temperature stations on earth. We now give ourselves over to Mr. JH’s scientific video game. Based on 30 year old science, when some cycles can last hundreds or thousands of years caused by natural cycles of thermo energy from our sun
But yet, we ignore that the sun has almost 100% of effect on our temperatures and CLIMATE, and why life exists on this rock in the first place.
RIP National geographic, I’ll miss you.

Me thinks the “CO2 drives the climate theory” is a little out of whack. Somebody needs to go back to the drawing board.
As a tax payer, I don’t mine funding climate research, but don’t give me garbage.

MarkoL (23:59:29) :
“Scaring people sells.”
Absolutely. Just wait until the become aware of the coming reduced growing seasons.

OT, but i thought u might like it.
From Glenn Beck, today’s post. “I learned something from a lawyer friend of mine who won lots of cases in front of judges and lawyers — I asked him how he won so many cases. He said it’s easy: If the law supports my client’s position I argue the law. If not, I argue the facts. If the facts don’t support my client’s position, I just attack the opposition”
Sounds like the AGW crowd doesn’t it?

I will once again point out that the errors given for model projections are not real errors. They are just estimates of the stability of the input conditions when they are testing their fit for chaotic inputs. They are not varying their numerous parameters within +/- 1 sigma . If they did that, the error bars would be close to 1C .
As I have often pointed out when one changes the albedo by 1sigma ( assuming a 1% error) in the toy model http://junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Earth_temp.html more than 0.3C is changed in the temperature projection. Let alone the effect of the systematic change in albedo seen in http://www.leif.org/research/albedo.png durng the years plotted above.
Models are meaningless fitting games.

The models are all 2D simulators. We need 3D to get a good history match from the past several million years. Only then can you project the model into the future. With so many variables we have an indeterminate solution. However; the AGW crowd have focused on CO2 emitted by man. That’s like saying while chewing gum I bit my lip and got lip cancer. Gum causes cancer.

matt v. (04:33:19) :
“…their credibilty will continue to be zero.”
In my opinion, the credibility of many climate models will be close to zero because the code developers (in particular the NASA GISS Model E) do a horrible job documenting and validating their codes (there are some exceptions). In the case of Model E, we don’t even know for sure what equations it’s attempting to solve – which in my mind makes it’s value to science zero! Yet, year after year GISS scientists publish papers about tipping points and AGW scare scenarios using Model E. I’ve been harping on Model E for some time now, but appears that the people at GISS are simply NOT interested in documenting their code…
Another aspect of these temperature anomaly comparisons that I find striking is that we have scientists running spatially 3-D, time-dependent calculations on large supercomputers to get a zero dimensional (“global average”), time-averaged (over a calendar year) result, which is then smoothed further to get running averages! And if it’s within 50% of reality, they claim their models are “accurate”! It has always amused me that people would claim that their codes “get the physics right” and have wonderful “predictive skill” based on a set of 3-D spatially averaged values, averaged in time and smoothed. And they need to ** tune ** their models to even get that set of numbers to show any reasonable agreement with reality…

I say cooling further.Soon too…

Lance (02:14:41) said:
RIP National geographic, I’ll miss you.
Personally, I gave up on them a few decades ago when they, along with everybody else in the coated stock four-color full page bleed world (antique publishing talk), threw-out DDT with the bathwater.
In the interest of preserving a select group of high-food-chain avian predators (the Peregrine Falcon was the cause celebre, IIRC), we ENTIRELY BANNED DTT worldwide. Not restricted it’s use in some way (e.g. within 100 meters of homes and schools, or even inside only), but an outright, total, worldwide ban.
“Even” the pesticide companies got on the bandwagon, but nobody at the time seemed to notice that DDT had years, nay decades, before gone off patent, and could be made simply and locally pretty much everywhere (a combination that is REALLY bad for what the economists call “excess rents”)
Meanwhile mosquito-borne diseases sky-rocketed in Africa and elsewhere equatorial, but the white folks (that means me) got to feel good about “saving the Peregrine”.
I consider the WW ban on DDT to be the first “Mob Action” on the environment, that is, an uncontrolled unconsidered irrational public outcry which leads to over-reaction and. not incidentally, corporate profit-taking (in this case, on patent pestidcides which are more expensive and don’t work as well.
We are on the cusp of another episode of Mob Action, but this time BP, XOM and RDS making plans to be in the vanguard of carbon sequestration. As I’ve mentioned before, pumping carbon dioxide into a petroleum reservoir (so called “CO2 flood”) is a tertiary production technique already well established to increase oil production from old fields. It would be irrational for the oil companies NOT to jump on a bandwagon which promises to PAY them to use a technique to increase their profits.

Question: “How many years must the models and reality diverge before it is accepted that the models are wrong?”
Easy answer – until just after cap’n’trade become enshrined in law, and then we can all be told it will be too “disruptive” to change things back, especially when we will need years and years and years and years of study to find out what to do next.
It’s not about the science, anyone who thinks that is missing the boat. The science is inconsequential – it’s all about the money. Whether it’s the governments, or the publications, or the grant getters – it’s all about the money.

The climate models don’t show how the climate actually works but how it must work if the run-away greenhouse effect exists.
They started with an hypothesis and built a model to demonstrate it. That’s all fine and can lead to better understanding of the actual climate. But the models must not be confused with the real-world.
Most of the gloom and doom projections are based not on observation but from models and statistical extrapolation. But the doomsayers seem to always forget to have a look outside to see if the models match the real world.
Each year, the models diverge from the observations. Eventually, the models get tweaked and updated. Most people don’t seem to notice that the models were reset. This is not how a scientific study is supposed to be run.

If you extend the time period using Hadcrut, you get a graph of the 20 yr trends that has a sinusoidal shape with a 60 yr wavelength and with one of the peaks at the end of the twentieth century. Very obvious in the 30 yr trends.
Here’s a plot: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3623/3446920199_52496549cb_b.jpg
If the models don’t show this sort of large structure then they are going to diverge from the observations.

Graeme Rodaughan (23:28:42) :
I think there is an error in your line:
“6] Increased export of manufacturing to other countries (i.e China).”
It should be read like this:
6] Increased IMPORT of manufacturing FROM OTHER countries (i.e China).
Reasons:
1.Decreased production due to your poits 1 to 5
2.Decreased production of crops due to increased cold in winter time.
3.Decreased production of crops and cattle due to great droughts in wide reagions of the USA.

Oh yeah – in my post about DDT… I was not referring to WUWT when I said “picking up lies from blogs”… sorry if it reads as a dig at this blog.

Re: Frank K. (05:29:12) :
“In my opinion, the credibility of many climate models will be close to zero because the code developers (in particular the NASA GISS Model E) do a horrible job documenting and validating their codes (there are some exceptions). ”
This is a sore point with me as well, since I have some background in programming.
On RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt argues against industry standard practices of source code management, configuration management, and disclosure of code and data. Here’s a salient quote from Schmidt in a response to comment 89 in the post On Replication:

“My working directories are always a mess – full of dead ends, things that turned out to be irrelevent or that never made it into the paper, or are part of further ongoing projects. Some elements (such a one line unix processing) aren’t written down anywhere. Extracting exactly the part that corresponds to a single paper and documenting it so that it is clear what your conventions are (often unstated) is non-trivial. – gavin]”

If this isn’t a reason to use source code control, documentation and configuration management, I don’t know what is.

Anthony:
I know this is OT from this thread and is political, but there isn’t really a good thread for it and it may interest your readers what is currently happening in Washington. If the link works, it opens a document mostly based on cap and trade legislative options.
NACD Submits Climate Document
The U.S. House Agriculture Committee recently distributed a questionnaire on climate legislation and related policy issues to more than 400 groups, including NACD. The questionnaire explored policy options for potential climate legislation. The NACD Legislative Committee completed the Association’s responses based on policy set by the NACD Board of Directors, and submitted the document to the Committee on Friday, April 10, 2009. To view a copy of the document, please click:
http://nacdnet.org/policy/naturalresources/energy/climate_legislation_questionnaire.pdf
The next steps of the House Agriculture Committee are not clear: the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which holds primary jurisdiction over climate policy, has released draft legislation and is expected to review and pass legislation by Memorial Day.
Chilling stuff!

MattB (07:41:21) :
If this was a statistically relevant diversion do you honestly think it would not be stated pretty clearly, rather than pondering if it means anything?
You ponder if it means anything because you don’t know what conclusion to draw without more information, but still find it interesting, correct? What exactly is wrong with that? The simple fact that it is happening calls into question the predictive power of the models in the first place, so it is clearly worth mentioning on that basis alone.
Mark

Here’s a wise editorial from Michael Barone on climate, statistics and changing our economy around a carbon tax. Link at:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/16/on_climate_and_health_beware_of_easy_formulas__96013.html
Thanks
Edward

Here’s a “funny” graphic. I digitized the HadCRUT3 curve onto Hansen’s 1988 model…:)
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Hansen_1988.jpg

neill (07:43:08) :
Science meeting. Is it a sort of “Focus Group” on carbon shares’ marketing?
Because that is just the purpose of all these Climate Models: There will be some who will receive carbon credits and those who will buy carbon shares, of course the “spread” will be fair (above 1000%). Carbon credits will be given to already existing sources (forests,etc) and carbon shares will be bought (mandatory) by existing “polluters”. At the end nothing will change, except for those who do the “business” (in the good all days it should has been called a swindle).
Those pirates at the indian ocean got a lot to learn!

PeteB (06:23:42) :
With regard to the Rahmstorf et al 2007 paper, you should read Lucia’s blog, which states that the statistical approach taken in the paper is not appropriate.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/comment-on-the-slide-and-eyeball-method/

@ Allan M R Macrae
Dang. Thanks.
Is WUWT great or what!? Thanks to Anthony and moderators for letting Allan put through that Susan Boyle performance on You Tube.
Yes, we need a little beauty and wonderment as we slog through the mire of the climate change debate.
(I haven’t watched that clip yet without tearing up and I’ll bet I’m not the only one batting back the tears:0)

MattB — calm down, son. There’s no need to get angry just because we don’t happen to agree with you. What point are you trying to make? We’re all set to listen if you have something worthwhile to say.
In case you hadn’t noticed the graphs we’re talking about show that computer game climatology looks as if it differs a bit from what is happening in the real world. Are we missing something somehwere.
(By the way, I know that DDT wasn’t actually totally banned in the whole world but we came pretty close to it and an awful lot of poor kids in Africa died that didn’t need to and all because the original premise was W-R-O-N-G and a lot of idiots were conned and greedy corporations jumped on a very profitable bandwagon … and that sounds awfully familiar)

MattB wrote: “If this was a statistically relevant diversion…”
I suspect that you do not understand the science behind what you’re attempting to comment on.
First, you should have used the phrase “statistically significant”, not relevant.
“Statistically relevant” comes from philosophy, not the hard sciences and as such means next to nothing. (Almost any relationship can be relevant) But statistical significance is a mathematically determined value.
You must have missed the 3rd graph, which shows that these results are indeed statistically significant. (Not to mention relevant!) You misread Andrew’s editorial speculation as a mathematical conclusion. Correctly stated, in your terms – “will this statistically significant deviation continue into the future? Only time will tell.” This is a true statement because mathematics can give us a reasonable guess about the future, but never an absolute certainty.
english majors. sheesh.

PeteB (06:23:42) : “This is quite heavily cited …”
The period of interest includes the 1993 cooling from the Mt. Pinatubo event and the 1998 El Nino warming …
See: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
which took about three years to dissipate. WUWT had a guest post by Bob Tisdale beginning in January. Part 1 is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/11/can-el-nino-events-explain-all-of-the-global-warming-since-1976-%e2%80%93-part-1/
Bob T’s material is longer, requires more thought, brings in more ideas, and in the end provides insight into Earth’s processes.
The paper you link to does none of this. The group of authors and the years chosen for this may indicate that they got together and deliberately produced a piece that would show their story in a way that would fit the data, be scary, and widely cited.
It is not helpful to the science.

WWS (09:36:31):
Agree! Now AGWers are trying to underestimate scientific algorithms and procedures. It seems to be an innovative strategy from AGW pseudoscience. Lucia Liljegren’s procedures for evaluating data are pretty correct and those procedures are used even by the purest AGW defenders. Nonetheless, AGWers try to say that we’ve applied those procedures on a wrong way, whereas if the same procedure is applied on the same way by an AGWer, but changing constants and flawing data, they raise it to a supernatural level. I am not used to speak on this tenor, but I have experienced the same thing with people who have not shown a single scientific foundation against my papers. The argument has been always the same.

O/T
My eyesight is not what it was but is there a very small sun-speck at about 12 o’clock?

J Scott Armstrong argues very well that calculated statistical significance shouldn’t be used either, thanks to it’s many pitfalls and abuses. From Wikipedia: In the papers “Significance Tests Harm Progress in Forecasting,”[4] and “Statistical Significance Tests are Unnecessary Even When Properly Done,”[5] Armstrong makes the case that even when done properly, statistical significance tests are of no value.”
I’ve long thought the same. It only ever seems to be used for spurious correlations. If you reject any paper on first sighting the phrase then you won’t ever miss anything useful. Dr Wm Briggs agreed with me on his blog that we’d be all better off if it just disappeared entirely from the field of statistics.

MattB (07:36:36) :
“hareynolds and others… there has never been an outright, total, worldwide ban on DDT. If you can’t even get something as basic as that right is it any wonder you don’t get AGW.”
The Stockholm Convention, with 98 signatory nations, banned the use of DDT world wide, effective 2002, with some parts of the world, controversially, still using it for disease vector control. Nations that required it, were severely limited, or couldn’t get it because reduced source (supply) increased the cost, and organizations that funded many of the eradication efforts succumbed to political correctness pressures and refused to fund DDT use.
If one is to be anally literal, your statement would stand. In a pragmatic sense, though, the ban is worldwide and total.
For such a literal-minded person, I’m surprised you are not concerned by the dichotomy between the AGW theories and models, and real-world observation.

CO2 Realist (07:53:41) :
On RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt argues against industry standard practices of source code management, configuration management, and disclosure of code and data. Here’s a salient quote from Schmidt in a response to comment 89 in the post On Replication:
“My working directories are always a mess – full of dead ends, things that turned out to be irrelevent or that never made it into the paper, or are part of further ongoing projects. Some elements (such a one line unix processing) aren’t written down anywhere. Extracting exactly the part that corresponds to a single paper and documenting it so that it is clear what your conventions are (often unstated) is non-trivial. – gavin]”
If this isn’t a reason to use source code control, documentation and configuration management, I don’t know what is.
—
Thanks for the quote. This is pretty shocking to say the least! Now, this would not be an issue to me if these codes were truly “research codes”. However, the fact of the matter is that the numerical solutions being generated by AOGCMs such as Model E have formed the basis of ** numerous ** scare stories in the media about tipping points, species extinction, ice free poles, etc. And now, with Cap and Trade looming, the influence of these codes and their “solutions” is going to have a crippling effect on our economy.
For this and many more reasons, I think all of the major climate models employed by the government for use in climate prediction studies should undergo a vigorous and thorough review process, where the authors are ** required ** to produce complete documentation of their algorithms, verification and validation procedures for all subroutines, and source code control documents which can trace all changes to the source code. This is the very least these people can do. But, alas, it’s not a very rewarding activity because, as Dr. Schmidt has said before, he’s not paid to document his work, he’s paid to do “science”!

I’m not really sure you can call it ‘diverging’ since, except at the 1999 start point, the lines on that graph were never that close anyway.
‘Getting further apart than ever’ would be a more accurate description.

“How can a graph be so very wrong?”
The subject is the population of the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8000402.stm
“The answer, crudely, is that the track record of population projection is abysmal. It borders on being a statistical lottery.”
The same people who spread alarm over AGW also see population as a problem
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4584572.stm

I also see (the lack of growth in) population (of native born residents of Western democracies) as a problem. It will shortly become an even bigger problem. At some point, the crash will affect the already weak economy. The global economy has never previously experienced a decline in market size. Previous declines in market size were prior to a truly global economy. Those two previous declines were the Plague and the Dark Ages. What we face is worse, from an economic impact perspective. Even the third world is coming up against fecundity issues – meanwhile in the more developed areas the die is already cast, too late to turn back from the slippery increasingly steep slope.

George E. Smith (11:49:03) :
because I’m absolutely sure that the raw data that goes into them is pure garbage.
I don’t disagree.
Until those who make the experimental observations start complying with the Nyquist sampling criterion; that governs ALL sampled data systems; these modesl will always predict nonsense.
I disagree. Actually, it all depends. What are the highest frequencies present in our climate? Most likely the day/night cycle is the highest, or at least, the highest that has any real impact. There may be higher frequencies, but I’ve never seen any discussion that indicates they have significance, which means they won’t cause problems if they get aliased. That said, at what time resolution do GCMs run?
Please wake me up when ANY of these GCMs, run backwards, correctly predicts the LIA and the MWP.
Given that they are likely highly non-linear, this can’t happen, either. An unfortunate consequence of non-linearity, indeed.
Mark

CO2 Realist (07:53:41) writes about the lacking software quality control for the CGM’s.
I have some experience with a large Fortran model with similar lack of software quality: the Dutch airport risk calculation tool. I left the Dutch National Aerospace Lab mostly because this piece of crap software was being used to generate risk contours on a map with actual legal consequences.
The errors in this p.o.s were staggering. It has generated contours that were turned into law, where only 1 in 25 gridcells were correctly calculated, most were randomly wrong, and about 8 in 25 were calculated with undetermined data.
All this happened because one of the data files (surface texture) had two spaces between each figure instead of three! I kid you not!
Another important bug in this model was in the actual equations, which would lead to an infinite risk density right at the centerpoint of any circlesegment of an aircrafts track.
I assume that the programmer who wrote it put some arbitrary limit in it, or that it actually never hit the infinity value because of non-grid alignment of the aircraft tracks
When I got there, nobody new how to visualize data, and I spent some time building something to get false color pictures from the risk probability density files. Then I noticed these weird patterns every 500 meter or so, and very bright spots right in the center of an aircraft track.
The moral of the story is: You GCM modellers, you better show us your code and every single line of it, and ALL data, and the actual equations you’re trying to model, and I’m damn sure we’ll find plenty of bugs in them, some of them major.
The amazing gall the GCM model people have to think that they program something that big without very tight software quality management is mindblowing. The credibility of your model calculations is NULL.

Read this nonsense
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8003060.stm

Replying to…
Aron (12:33:02) :
Read this nonsense
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8003060.stm
Apart from the bits about “man made” and “greenhouse gas emissions”, it’s a very good article…;)

Regarding the disucssion of quality control and disclosure of the models:
Frank K. (11:17:51) :
“…I think all of the major climate models employed by the government for use in climate prediction studies should undergo a vigorous and thorough review process, where the authors are ** required ** to produce complete documentation of their algorithms, verification and validation procedures for all subroutines, and source code control documents which can trace all changes to the source code.”
Bart van Deenen (12:30:04) :
“The moral of the story is: You GCM modellers, you better show us your code and every single line of it, and ALL data, and the actual equations you’re trying to model, and I’m damn sure we’ll find plenty of bugs in them, some of them major…The credibility of your model calculations is NULL.”
I couldn’t agree more with both of you, and my experience is only with commercial business software. I’ve even heard arguments that there’s no need to document code, just read the code. But what if the code is wrong? Now you’re gleaning the logic and goal of the code from incorrectly written code?
With the huge impacts financially, socially, and politically, the models need to at the very least be held to the standards of commercial software. And don’t get me started on garbage in, garbage out. We know from this blog that there are huge issues with data quality.

“jack mosevich (12:14:20) :
Nasif and Sam: Black speck at 5 o’clock may be a bad pixel in the camera. Lief has mentioned such things before.”
Yea, it is a burt pixel on the detector. It might go away the next time they do a burnout on the detectors but for now it is a permanent feature. Actually they are so desparate to see the sunspot number going up that they want to give this burnt pixel a permanent sunspot number. 😉

Aron (12:33:02) :
The public is being sold a message that if we control C02 we control climate change. It is a dangerous message. The BBC story correctly confronts the very real paleo drought cycles- yet only cautions against C02. It is time for us to look at our infrastructure and its ability to withstand known weather/climate variations-drought return does not require global warming, a major hurricane striking NYC does not require global warming etc. Some of our infrastructure needs to be hardened whether or not we agree with climate models. This important question is unfortunately being lost in the heat of the “debate.”

As for baby boomers Steve. Expect them to head for Mexico.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/030109dnintsellingsouth.3beb5c2.html

“”” Mark T (12:04:38) :
George E. Smith (11:49:03) :
because I’m absolutely sure that the raw data that goes into them is pure garbage.
I don’t disagree.
Until those who make the experimental observations start complying with the Nyquist sampling criterion; that governs ALL sampled data systems; these modesl will always predict nonsense.
I disagree. Actually, it all depends. What are the highest frequencies present in our climate? Most likely the day/night cycle is the highest, or at least, the highest that has any real impact. There may be higher frequencies, but I’ve never seen any discussion that indicates they have significance, which means they won’t cause problems if they get aliased. That said, at what time resolution do GCMs run?
Please wake me up when ANY of these GCMs, run backwards, correctly predicts the LIA and the MWP.
Given that they are likely highly non-linear, this can’t happen, either. An unfortunate consequence of non-linearity, indeed.
Mark “””
Surely you jest Mark ? From all the postings I have seen here; GISStemp inputs are based on daily max/min readings of what; Anomalies; or temperatures ? Either way, a min/max can only be a suitable sample if the signal is a pure sinusoid, or some other time symmetrical waveform; which is most unlikely. Clearly the morning heat up is faster than the evening coolbdown so there is no way that the daily cycle is time symmetric. So it has to have at least a second harmonic component; which means that two samples per day is already a Nyquist violation by a factor of two which is all it takes to give aliassing errors of the zero frequency or average of the signal.
Even at 4 times per day; one is forced to conclude that the effect of clouds cannot be included; so already there is a gross departure from reality.
So already we have a failure in temporal space.
There”s that little matter of spatial sampling. Given that 73% of the earth surface is ocean; just think of the sampling failure there.
The Arctic (north of +60) has somewhere in the 70-80 surface sampling locations.
Don’t even mention Antarctica; as the Steig paper demonstrates; that place is a textbook case of sampling genius; was it 12 stations or some similar number that were used to concoct his analysis ?
Just as wild guess, I would guess that the spatial undersampling would be by 4-5 orders of magnitude at the minimum.
I just have to look at the 6:00 PM weather report for the SF Bay area, to see how high the spatial frequencies can get.
Nyquist does not require uniform sampling; which is the minimum sample solution; but the maximum sample spacing that occurs in a non uniform sampling still has to conform to the highest signal frequency. Maybe its six orders of magnitude undersampling.
In any case; even a correct sampling regimen, to give a believable average is of little value, since the thermal processes that determine the energy balance of the planet are non linear functions of local temperatures; are terrain dependent; and in the case of radiative transfer are at least fourth power of temperature.
When it comes then to the effect of GHGs such as CO2, then it is a fifth power function of temperature.
The central limit theorem and other prestidigitations can’t buy you a reprieve from Nyquist violations.
But climate “Scientists” are only too happy to drill a handfull of ice cores in antarctica and/or Greenland, and then declare the results pertinent to the entire planet.
They need to watch more horse operas on TV, to watch the wheels go backwards, as the hero rides to rescue the damsel in distress on the runaway wagon.
By the way; the average of the Nth power of any cyclic function, is always greater than the average of the function; so taking the 4th power of some fictional earth average temperature, to compute the radiative balance always underestimates the true cooling that is occurring (due to radiation).
George

I should have said the Nth root of the average of the Nth power of any cyclic function, is always greater than the average of the function; but then you already knew I meant that; Right ?
George

Sorry Charles; just trying to keep a smile on your face; in view of the dismal predictions of scientifically dismal substitutes for observations.
George; who likes to laugh too !

You have to love that Monckton. His letter to Congress and the president, linked in the comments above, is a highly recommended read. If only we could find a way to insure that they all read it, though that would probably entail strapping them all in chairs and stapling their eyelids to their foreheads until they were done. Alas, given Obama’s continuing reputation for “brilliance”, which strongly indicates that possessing a room temperature IQ puts you 2-3 sigma above the mean inside the Beltway, most of them wouldn’t be able to understand it, even if they had any inclination to actually consider the evidence before sending us all to carbon phobia induced Hell, which it is fairly obvious they do not. I’d say the probability that Algore will respond to Monckton’s challenge and agree to a public debate can now officially and permanently be posted at negative infinity.

Aron:
I consider that as saying Africa should sit at the back of the bus in order to save the white man’s wealth….I’m sorry…I meant planet.
History always laughs at those wishful thinking. Remember that after the II world war a certain general was asking permission to wipe off the communist menace from China…Now China is the first buyer of US debt..
As in the latino song says “vueltas que da la vida” (life turns around ya know)

To Aron’s (13:59:02) :
Populaton explosion. Perdictions vs reality.
Not to inject any bodily jokes in rather serious discussion, but…
The misspelled word “perdiction” sounds very much like a Russian word that describes an act of flatulence, i.e. farting. I believe that it turned out to be very appropriate in the context it was used:
BBC’s “perdictions” vs reality

>2005 El Nino…
“timetochooseagain” 2005 was not an El Nino – it was a neutral year. Indeed, if anything it was influenced more by the weak La Nina of 2004 which makes it more remarkable as a record hot year.

At the end of the BBC article on population, an alarmist comment is left by a reader who avoids the facts that birth and death rates have been dropping worldwide for some time. This is the reader’s comment “Something clearly must be done to stem that growth if we’re to avoid future environmental problems and resource shortages.”
It shows you the totalitarian thinking that lies in the minds of these save the world types (which normally means “Save me from coloured people, please! I don’t want them to be wealthy and free! All the resources must belong to me only!!”
He wants something radical to be done to stem population growth. Well, that has been done before. The Eugenics movement sought to eliminate the weak from the gene pool and promote genes which matched certain defined ethno-types so that the planet’s resources would not be “wasted” on inferior members of the human species.
The Nazis sought to sterilise ethnic groups who they felt were physically, mentally and spiritually inferior so that resources would only be for people they deemed of Aryan stock (a fictional ethnic group). The Holocaust of Jews and gypsies was an example of population growth control driven by eugenics and resource allocation.
In China they enforced a one child per family law that caused many female fetuses to be aborted because males were preferred. Female babies were also killed. In some cases when a couple had more than one child, law enforcers would forcibly take babies away from mothers or kill babies to have their organs sold. This again was all done in the name of allocating resources under a model of sustainable development. Not only did the one child per family policy failed but so did the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Free market policies increased China’s life expectancy, reduced death rates, reduced infant mortality and lowered birth rates despite a relaxing of the one child per family law. At this rate it is highly likely China’s population will drop to below a billion by the middle of the century and so will India’s.

Several have posted about Nat Geo. I agree that it’s become no more than an AGW advocacy site.
One of my favorites from the “HEAD I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE DEPARTMENT”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060911-growing-glaciers.html

CO2 Realist (07:53:41) :
Re: Frank K. (05:29:12) :
“In my opinion, the credibility of many climate models will be close to zero because the code developers (in particular the NASA GISS Model E) do a horrible job documenting and validating their codes (there are some exceptions). ”
This is a sore point with me as well, since I have some background in programming.
On RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt argues against industry standard practices of source code management, configuration management, and disclosure of code and data….

You have hit on what I consider to be one of many extremely important points. As a long time computer scientist myself, I cannot imagine how one could seriously consider conclusions from codes developed so haphazardly. The necessary methods unemployed in the design and construction methodologies evident within the codes and mechanisms of all of the models I have inspected (Model E for example), leave me completely unconvinced of the accuracy and consequence of their results. I simply cannot take seriously a piece of software so poorly written, poorly designed, poorly constructed, poorly managed and poorly maintained. Simply non-credible and bad science in the worst of ways.

Mike McMillan (15:36:52) :
Mike I explained it for Tom here: BarryW (14:16:34) :
The trick is to plot the trends based on the ending year not the start year. So the trend plotted is the trend based on the months prior to that date not after it. So for January 2009 the plotted trend is based on the data from the preceding 240 months of data for the 20 yr trend (Jan 1990 to Jan 2009 inclusive).

Lucia, I think the $64K question here is ‘How does the current climate trend downturn compare with the last cyclic downturn and the last cyclic upturn’.
If this downturn is similar or less than the last downturn and the last upturn, then we are just going back to where we were 60 or so years ago. Not good news, but not particularly bad news either.
Eyeballing the data with volcanos removed (link below) the current downturn looks very similar to the 1940s downturn. The 1940s downturn stopped at around the current level (in terms of the drop in the anomaly) and then was basically flat for a decade or so, before resuming the up trend.
If we repeat the 1940s then temperatures will stay around current levels for a decade or more, which is nothing to worry about. Although the models will be categorically invalidated.
If we see further falls from here, say by more than -0.2C, then the current temperature downturn will look more like the 30 years of cooling temps from 1890.
If we see significantly more than -0.2C then we are into uncharted territory in terms of the (thermometer) temperature record and who knows where we go from there.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/12/17/recent-temperature-trends-in-context/
How large can temperature changes get. Well the study below shows a 22C rise (no mistake there) in temperatures at the start of current interglacial around 10K years ago.
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=2934948

which curve is the Reality?
or which one is more close to the Reality?
Could anyone tell me that?
Thank you.

KimW (18:12:41) :…centuries-long “megadroughts”…climate change could make this kind of drought more devastating…
Wow – AGW could turn the “megadroughts” into “super megadroughts”.
Is anyone else getting tired of hearing this crap?

Hi John and Douglas, a very warm “Hello there!” to Anthony
and many thx to Lucia and Chad for the graphs! 🙂
Greeting reader! 🙂
John Finn (06:38:54) :
Douglas DC (06:21:40) :
I say cooling further.Soon too…
Could you be more specific. What do you mean by “soon”?
Well I just wanted to comment that what you are seeing here are the intergrated longyear trends . .
Even if the temperature would decide to rise faster, the difference to the models for the trends shown on these graphs would still be different to the models for years to come.
In other words the 20 year trend is affected by this year for the last and the next 20years!
All the best,
LoN

CO2 Realist (18:42:37) :
“Looks like many of us are on the same page regarding quality and documentation of the models. Even though I’m not a scientist, the part of the climate debate I know something about (programming and standard practices) is hopelessly corrupted. Why am I not to think the other parts I’m not as well versed in aren’t of similar dubious quality”
Before we get off this topic, those who are interested should check out the worst example of climate code documentation – the GISS Model E. You can read about it here:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/index.html
For their code “documentation” they reference the following paper:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2006/Schmidt_etal_1.html
Please look at this paper and count the number of equations. I think there are six altogether.
I’ve looked around and there doesn’t appear to be any place where the GISS researchers are brave enough to list the differential equations they are solving. And of course there is no complete description of their algorithms beyond the cursory descriptions given in the link above. Like many research organizations, GISS feel that a list of possibly relevant papers is enough code documentation for them.
And then there is the code itself, which can be found here…
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/modelEsrc/
The FORTRAN here is typical research code i.e. mostly no comments, poor formatting, very few pointers to any documentation, and nearly impossible to follow, unless you were one of the original developers.
For another example of GISS coding standards, there is the infamous GISTEMP here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/
Try to figure out what this code is really doing versus the description given in the “documentation”…

great information … i have book marked this site and will come back in times

Philip_B (18:37:10) :
A very simple everyday demonstration of this is to compare deserts to tropics. Which is warmer? and why?
The humid tropics are a lot warmer than hot deserts such as the Sahara, by about 10C (annual average). This is due to the water vapour greenhouse effect (in the tropics).
Although, having lived in both the humid tropics and hot desert climates, I know clouds have a much greater cooling effect in hot deserts than the humid tropics.
So, a wetter (more water vapour) world is a warmer world, but a cloudier world is a cooler world.

Yes, the average temperature in the tropics will stay warmer because the water vapor will hold the heat, however, the tMax will not reach nearly as high in the tropics as it will in the desert because of the negative feedback of the water vapor. Several papers out there (many listed in other threads on WUWT) clearly show this to be true.

Thanks all,
I found the exchange here between David Stockwell and Stefan interesting
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=554#comment-84440
and also the stuff on David Stockwell’s site
I am not sure I understand the statistics well enough, but 16 years seems too short a period, (certainly for temperature, maybe not for sea level) to say that temperature is increasing faster than the IPCC estimates – to be fair Stefan did acknowledge that in the original paper
Given the relatively short 16-year time period considered,
it will be difficult to establish the reasons
for this relatively rapid warming, although
there are only a few likely possibilities. The first
candidate reason is intrinsic variability within the
climate system.
Its a pity somebody couldn’t have taken up Stefan’s challenge though
[Response: If you really think you’d come to a different conclusion with a different analysis method, I suggest you submit it to a journal, like we did. I am unconvinced, though. -stefan]

you need a celebrity to take up the cause and make it fashionable to question climate change, maybe susan boyle can be the spokesperson in a years time LOL

E.M.Smith (02:22:33) says:
Can you imagine what would happen in a real production shop if your compilation procedure is ~”or whatever, and edit the code a bit”…
and
At the end we are told what to do as a manual step “if all went well”. One is left to wonder how one knows if all went well, and what the acceptance criteria might be…
Now you’re really scaring me. Apparently it is much worse than I thought.
E.M.Smith (03:02:13) says:
I have the code on line and with comments…
Great effort. I’ll have a look though Fortran is not my strong point.
3×2 (02:35:47) says:
A complete house of cards.
Quite the understatment.
Anthony, here’s another vote for a post of E.M.Smith’s analysis.
REPLY: Convince him to pack it up into a single document and I’ll have a look. – Anthony

Frank K. (05:44:04) writes:
E.M.Smith (03:02:13) :
Thanks for the link! Your analysis of GISTEMP is extraordinary and worthy of a post here at WUWT (perhaps in several installments). How about it, Anthony? :^)
I added my vote at CO2 Realist (07:20:39) and Anthony replied:
REPLY: Convince him to pack it up into a single document and I’ll have a look. – Anthony
So E.M.Smith, what do you say? I think it would be educational for many here.

The problems in the science of Monckton’s analysis have been presented elsewhere, e.g.:
e.g.http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.4600?context=physics
and the plots at the top of this very thread are hardly consistent with his claim of current global cooling.
But what most amused me in his submission to Congress referenced above was his frequent use of a logo in the background of his figures that bears a striking resemblance to the portcullis insignia of the Houses of Parliament:
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/3170/portcullis.png
I suppose these were used by Monckton as a vague appeal to authority, although the use of the portcullis insignia is tightly regulated:
“In 1996, the usage of the crowned portcullis was formally authorised by licence granted by Her Majesty the Queen for the two Houses unambiguously to use the device and thus to regulate its use by others. The emblem should not be used for purposes to which such authentication is inappropriate, or where there is a risk that its use might wrongly be regarded, or represented as having the authority of the House.”
But what is amusing is not whether Monckton is misusing the insignia in his submission. Although he inherited a title, Viscount Monckton is not even a member of the House of Lords. When he stood for election in 2007 by his fellow Conservative peers, he received precisely zero votes.

@ TomP – “But what most amused me …” and what follows
Why do you think that this public demonstration of your personal antipathy towards Lord Monckton is of any interest to anyone?
Rather than continuing to speak through your backside, I suggest that you put it back in your pants, where it undoubtedly belongs, and then …. sit on it!

Philip_B,
Please read the y-axis label of the three figures: it is the trend, not the temperature that is decreasing. All three figures indicate we continue to warm, not cool.
Can you offer any explanations for that?

Deep Climate

compare these observed longer (20-year) trends to the IPCC early 21st century projected trend of 0.2 C/decade, based on the multi-model ensemble used in IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapter 10 projections.

Except Lucia and others have pointed out to you that you’ve sort of cherry-picked that 0.2 C/decade benchmark (how ’bout those volcanoes?)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/hadcrut-march-data-available/#comment-12890
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/hadcrut-march-data-available/#comment-12900

Hmm.
Looks like the individual comment links are not unique.
You’ll have to scroll down to read Lucia’s relevant comments.

PeteB:
I have submitted a different conclusion with the same analysis method, simply with two additional years data. The non-linear trend is no longer in the upper region of the IPCC projections for temperature. See powerpoint at post http://landshape.org/enm/newcastle-lecture-update/ for the image.

David Stockwell,
Your analysis is heavily skewed by a single year’s inclusion, 2008. 2009 is shaping up considerably warmer, and so the trend is now being pushed up again.
Given the noise in the data, the end of trend line will always be wiggling around like the head of a snake. You’ve snapped the snake head looking down, as it has before, but the full movie will show it’s often pointing above trend. If you use monthly rather than yearly data and calculate up to date you’ll see the snake is starting to look up again.
Should a paper on this topic be so time sensitive that its conclusions depend on whether the trend is calculated in 2006, 2008 or 2009?

David,
I see your point, though “fragile” is the right word, not bogus – you can’t show Rahmstorf is wrong, just that he hasn’t made the case.
There is certainly a contradiction between your results and Lucia’s analysis. You show that temperatures are near the mid-range of IPCC TAR,
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/liite5_paivitetty_rahmstorf.jpg
while Lucia shows them falling below. I think the model comparison is different, but this might also to be due to her using long-term linear least-square trends, which will always fall below even a perfect model which predicts temperatures above a linear trend.
An OLS trend is also a poor choice as it weights data points at the beginning of the series equally to the most recent. The best estimate of the future trend at any point will be from a Kalman filter, which reduces to an exponentially weighted least squares trend. Wouldn’t this be the best way of comparing data to the model?
By the way, have you posted a version of your submitted article on this?