People send me stuff. Today I got a document dump, not quite on the Scale of ClimateGate but interesting nonetheless.
These are the Met Office’s past reports to the COP climate conferences going back to 1998, containing predictions about climate change. WUWT readers will surely be interested in examining how accurate those predictions have turned out to be. For example, here’s a figure from the COP4 report in 1998:
There is too much information here to take in today, so this seems like a perfect opportunity for crowd-sourcing bu WUWT readers. In comments make your points with references to the document, and excerpts, and compare to what we know today with appropriate references and citations.
I’ll publish another thread on what you’ve found.
These are all PDF files, some as large as 5MB.
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Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Researchers needed
I tried to do something similar with IPCC predictions recently. Finding the raw data for predictions can be hard, but I found this handy tool, which allows the reverse-engineering of charts. http://digitizer.sourceforge.net/
–“The majority of the research work carried out within the Met Office Hadley Centre
uses a world-leading global climate model that includes many different components of the climate system.”– OOH, “World-Leading” model. Must be good.
Just like with psychics, ignore the failed predictions and concentrate on the 1-2% they get right.
A ring through the nose is bull leading, which mainly means it goes where you want him to go.
“A ring through the nose is bull leading, which mainly means it goes where you want him to go.”
Yeah, but be careful you don’t get (Al) Gored by the data.
This is with reference to the first graph which is also on COP4, page 5, where the land temperature was expected to greatly increase over this past decade. Crutem4 is now on woodfortrees, but there is a slight problem. It only goes to the end of 2010. Mathematicians may wish to improve on my crude analysis, but for what it is worth, here is what I did. I took the slope of crutem3 from 2002 to December 2010 and found it to be -0.00200314. Then I found the slope from 2002 to January 2012, its latest value, and found it to be -.00793462. The drop for the additional 13 months was 0.00593. The slope of crutem4 from 2002 to December 2010 was 0.00585. So if I am allowed to make the assumption that when crutem4 is completely updated, that there would be a similar drop, there will be NO temperature change in land for the past decade.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/from:2000/plot/crutem4vgl/from:2002/trend/plot/crutem3vgl/from:2000/plot/crutem3vgl/from:2002/to:2011/trend/plot/crutem3vgl/from:2002/trend
Oh if I only had some time…on a drop-dead rush job but just great material to analyse.
Ben – thanks for the link – good stuff.
These reports future temp change graphs do not use the same baseline years for baseline ave. temp.
COP4 and COP6 use a baseline temp of 1860 – 1890. By COP8 it looks like 1960-1990 perhaps. Then the rest maybe 1980-2010 perhaps. Mostly it’s not specifically stated what the baseline year range is for ave. temp.
Even with the changing baseline years for ave. temp the temp change charts temp change out to 2100 is fairly consistant at 3-5 deg. C.
You don’t even have to look past 1980 to see it is garbage.
None of the curves show the ~1950-~1980 decline. The curves aren’t real data prior to the date of the graph. That makes the entire graph fake.
The curves look like they were taken straight off the fake Mon Loa “real time” but actually artificial linear CO2 curve.
Until the models can replicate the past future predictions are a biased guess that maintains funding.
Between 2000 and today the AR4 models predicted .33 ° C warming. Actual warming has actually ZERO so the error is infinite.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/strandwg/CCSM3_AR4_Experiments.html
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2005/to:2009/plot/uah/from:2005/to:2009/trend
Ben Pile says:
April 14, 2012 at 7:37 am
I tried to do something similar with IPCC predictions recently. Finding the raw data for predictions can be hard, but I found this handy tool, which allows the reverse-engineering of charts. http://digitizer.sourceforge.net/
—————————————————
Cool link Ben. What a great idea – reverse-engineering visual data to its numerical form (allowing for further numerical analysis beyond that which can be achieved by a human staring at a chart). Nice. Thanks.
“Probably the greatest uncertainty in future projections of climate arises from clouds and their interactions with radiation … even the sign of this feedback remains unknown” — IPCC (TAR 2001)
“Cloud effects “remain the largest source of uncertainty” in model based estimates of climate sensitivity” — IPCC (AR4 2007)
“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”. IPCC Special Report on Extremes 2012
See further quotes at: Roger Pielke Jr. & WUWT
COP4 p 5
However, in COP12 there is no mention of “clouds”, “feedback” or “feed back” or “sensitivity” or “sign” or “hindcast”, or “validate” or “verify” or “verified” . However, there are 13 occurrences of “likely”. e.g.,
How do we know that the MetOffice did not get their predictions backwards like the CSIRO as found by David Stockwell in Tests of Regional Climate Model Validity in the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report
I noticed that the predictons made in 2000 were much lower than those made in 1998.
[they were still way wrong but lower.]
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/strandwg/CCSM3_AR4_Experiments.html
The Met Office have just been given a £60 million grant to improve their computer system for climate change research. Money makes the world go round.
Net Dr. Good one. Infinity is pretty big; is it not.
COP12 from 2006 devotes four pages to PRECIS, Providing REgional Climates for Impacts
Studies.
It “is a regional climate modelling system allowing Hadley Centre regional climate models to be set up over any region and run on a PC (under the Linux operating system) with a simple user interface.
“It also includes a suite of data processing, analysis and display tools so experiments can easily be set up, run, analysed and data made available for wider application and dissemination.
“PRECIS is designed for researchers (with a focus on developing countries) to construct high-resolution climate change scenarios for their region of interest.
“These scenarios can be used in impact, vulnerability and adaptation studies, and to aid in the preparation of National Communications, as required under Articles 4.1 and 4.8 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).”
COP12 focused on its use in India, China and Africa. It would be interesting if WUWT could obtain PRECIS, if at all possible, to give an insight into how the Hadley Centre are creating regional climate models and related studies to present to the UN.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/precis/
Kaboom says:
“A ring through the nose is bull leading, which mainly means it goes where you want him to go.”
I suppose you could make the case that a ring on the finger is miss leading. Misleading seems like a better term to describe the global climate model from the Hadley Centre rather than world-leading.
60 million pounds? Have they considered buying a couple of copies of Piers Corbyn’s laptop? That would save a lot and provide much more valuable and accurate forecasts.
By the time the 10th report comes out, the predictions will have morphed into exactly what occurred. And then they can say they were right.
Mmmmmm!
But won’t other areas of land get more rainfall? Does all this extra rainfall have a particular preference for the open sea? I have no idea.
I find it staggering how much the Met Office relies on models to make its projections. No wonder so many people died of cold in the UK after being snowed in over the past few years.
I downloaded the 1998 COP4.
This document was produced by a literal Who’s Who of British climate scientists: UK Met. Office Hadley Centre: Chris Folland, David Parker, Briony Horton, John Mitchell, Tim Johns, Christine Coughlan, Anne Keen, Nick Rayner , David Roberts, Andy Jones, Paul Jacobs, Simon Tett and Geoff Jenkins
Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia: Keith Briffa, Phil Jones, Mike Hulme and David Viner.
The Figure on page 4 shows the UK Met/UEA predicted temperature anomalies from 1859 through to 2100. These predictions were made by “the new Hadley Centre Climate model.” Experience leads one to suspect that the even newer Hadley Centre climate models constructed since 1998 would predict pretty much the same trends.
On top of these predictions, I’ve plotted HADCRUT3 global anomalies out to 2012, normalized to their 1851-1900 mean. The result is here: http://i44.tinypic.com/ser3ok.jpg or, if they can be made to appear: The original Legend is included.
Both plots are on the same scale and were adjusted to the same frame dimensions. So, the lines are directly comparable just by inspection. If you look hard, you’ll see the original tick-marks below mine. For the following comparisons I estimated the mean trends, ignoring all the random temperature spikes.
Comparison shows that the UEA measured global anomalies consistently undershoot the predicted anomalies after about 1950. By 2012, the measured global temperature is about 0.3 C cooler than the predicted global temperature.
I then normalized the GISS land anomalies to their 1880-1900 mean and again plotted them over the UEA predictions. The disparity in land temperature anomalies is much worse than the global disparity. The result is here: http://i43.tinypic.com/2rcrkau.jpg, or, if they can be made to appear: The original Legend is again included.
The GISS land surface anomalies again consistently depart from the predicted land surface anomalies after about 1950. By 2011, the measured land anomalies are a full 1 C cooler than the predicted land surface anomalies.
It would look like CRU GCM falsification to me, if I believed that the surface air temperatures could be measured to better than (+/-)0.5 C accuracy and/or that GCMs could actually produce a valid air temperature prediction.
The Met Office must realize these predictions are going to be cut to threads? Why did they release them? Sorry I can’t help in the breakdown, I’m only here for the geeky snark.