By Tom Quirk
The IPCC use of computer models to predict temperatures, rain fall, sea level rises and other weather related events either global or regional has comprehensively failed to predict most of the observations made in the last twenty years and ignores any analysis that suggests natural variability as the main driver of climate. Ad hoc effects are put forward in order to explain why the model predictions parted company from the observations. This is most obvious in looking at the components of radiative (temperature) forcing (Figure SPM.5) where such effects as aerosols appear as contributions with 100% uncertainty. This is not a statistically derived uncertainty but rather an “expert” opinion on an effect that is needed to “balance the books”. Yet all the uncertainties are combined as if they are all well behaved statistical errors.
The report is best summed up by the classic Polish saying from Soviet times – The future is certain only the past is unpredictable.
There are a series of points that one can take immediate objection to:
- The temperature plateau from 2000 to the present year is dismissed as of no consequence. The report has borrowed the reply of Chou En Lai who, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, replied that “It was too early to tell”. Yet in 1988 James Hansen appearing before a Congressional committee said he was 99% certain that the temperature rise from 1977 was not a natural variation.
- The oceans that have been ignored up to now have suddenly become centre stage as the lodging place for the heat that should have raised the global temperature. The extra infra-red radiation from the increasing atmospheric CO2 is absorbed in the top 2 millimetres of the ocean. This is then mixed by wave motion through the top 100 to 200 metres of the oceans. But the sea surface temperature is in equilibrium with the air surface temperatures so how has the heat energy achieved this avoidance. Of course the deep ocean from 1,000 to 4,000 metres is at 40C or less and any overturning of the deep ocean would cause no end of trouble. This looks like another ad hoc explanation.
- Sea level rises are forecast to be as much as 1 metre by 2100 yet the measurements show quite different annual rises in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Indeed a good pair of gumboots should get our grandchildren through 2100 with the present measured annual increases.
- Methane is referred to as reaching unprecedented levels in the atmosphere with no suggestion that its annual increases have fallen by a factor of eight since 1995[2]. Three of the scenarios (now called trajectories) have reasonable methane concentrations out to the year 2100 but the fourth (RCP 8.5) is an echo of the early extreme scenario A1FI and a little more borrowed from another earlier scenario of the IPCC 2007 report. The main justification for the more than doubling of the present methane level of 1750 ppb to 3750 ppb in 2100 may be to keep the highest temperature and sea level rise predictions in play. This last scenario is of course used by the CSIRO to predict the end of Sydney and Brisbane airports.
- There is a reference (Figure SPM.4 (a)) to the long running time series measurements of atmospheric CO2 at the South Pole (black line) and Mauna Loa (red line). What has not been pointed out is that in 1958 to 1960, there is no difference in these measurements between the two stations but it remains unexplained. Also there is a modest bump in 1990 that had the Point Barrow measurements at latitude 710N been included would have shown a modest 2 year plateau in CO2 concentration. This, when properly analysed, shows that about 2.5 GtC of CO2 entered and left the Northern Hemisphere atmosphere in the space of 4 years when fossil fuel CO2 emissions were 6 GtC in 1990 with 90% occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.. Yet we are taught that fossil fuel emissions are absorbed with great difficulty by the land and oceans.. This is at the time of the Mount Pinatubo eruption but the CO2 output has been estimated at only 0.015GtC so volcanic activity is not the cause.
Left: IPCC SPM.4 (a) and Right: CO2 measurements at Point Barrow
- The temperature plateau from 2000 to the present has been variously explained by heat disappearing into the oceans, volcanic activity and a lessening of solar radiation (dismissed in this IPCC report). The failure to acknowledge the impact of the oceans that cover 70% of the surface of the earth not only on the temperature behaviour but also CO2 is extraordinary[3]. But the explanation may be that we do not understand what triggers the phase changes in the oceans where up-welling cold water displaces warmer water and of course the reverse. So it is not possible to model such events and this would be an admission of complete failure of the computer models.
- Regional models should not be regarded as having any useful predictive power if the global models have been unsuccessful. There is a problem with regional modelling over land as the assumption that the mean temperature is the average of the minimum and maximum temperatures can increase temperatures by up to 0.50C. This distorts the heat load over the land and thus would cause a systematic error in computer modelling results.
This report from the IPCC should be its last. Not only has the climate science research community extracted billions of dollars from politicians but tens if not hundreds of billions have been invested in schemes to reduce CO2 emissions with little to show by way of reductions.
The last word should be left to Jonathon Swift who brilliantly satirized the Royal Society in Gulliver’s Travels[4]. Gulliver is taken to the country of Balnibarbi whose enlightened rulers have adopted new methods of agriculture and building but the country appears to be in ruins as “the only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection”.
[1] Catch phrase from Little Britain BBC TV series
[2] http://www.ipa.org.au/library/publication/1339463096_document_twentieth_century_sources_of_methane_in_the_atmosphere.pdf
[3] See http://www.ipa.org.au/library/publication/1339463007_document_break_paper_apjas_ipa.pdf
[4] http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9213
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Diggity!
An article this morning in The Weekly Standard contained this gem:
Much was made in the media in recent weeks of how some governments were pressuring the IPCC to offer an explanation of the current 15-year “pause” in warming that is confounding the models. (This raises a curious question: Why do we need a “Summary for Policymakers” if policymakers determine what’s emphasized in the summary? Clearly the SPM should be called by its true name: Summary for Headline Writers.)
Strange that so many excuses and hand waving is needed in what we were told time and again was ‘settled science’. While that those that ask just how ‘settled ‘ it really was and suggested other options were attacked both personal and professional by the same climate ‘scientists’ now desperately trying to shift the goal posts.
But when all you have if hand of rubbish and your all in, the only hope you have is o keep bluffing in the hope everyone else gives up. So you can see why they do it .
Computer predictions have not only been wrong because of the natural ENSO variation for surface temperatures, they have also been very wrong on the rate of loss of ice from the Arctic ocean and the Greenland icecap.
Computer modelling of the land ice in glaciers and the rate of mass loss from Antarctica have also been wrong.
In all but surface temperatures computer modelling has grossly underestimated the amount of climate change that has actually been observed to have happened.
The inherent unpredictability of the main natural variation, ENSO, is a major block on shorterm predictions. It is a warning that the other purported ‘cycles’ like the NAO or PDO are unlikely to be simple predictable oscillations with neatly fixed periods and amplitudes.
There is no science left in government sponsored climate science; it is simply a cult. The insane desire of the UN to “control climate” through carbon taxes and scare tactics is propaganda not facts. National governments see climate change as a mechanism to exert control over its citizen’s activities while simultaneously creating more dependency on government.
It’s a huge, worldwide scam with enormous amounts of money and power at stake. It’s time to stop arguing over minor details with the climate cult and expose the secret backroom, cook the books character of the entire mess. No amount of ridicule of this hoax would be too much.
The “Summary for Policymakers” is obviously not for informing policymakers, but rather for their use in supporting their policy objectives. Who knew?
The Barrow data actually flattens following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Mount Pinatubo placed metal rich dust into the surface water of the oceans, with a slight bias to the Northern Hemisphere. The extra biological activity appears to have been reason for the arrest in rising CO2.
@- Ed Reid
“The “Summary for Policymakers” is obviously not for informing policymakers, but rather for their use in supporting their policy objectives.”
That is why the policymakers insist on having a major role in constructing the summary, and why it has so often been far more conservative {small c!} than the cutting edge of the scientific findings.
Another major failing of computer predictions was in the effect of the polar amplification in the Arctic weakening the N hemisphere jet stream. The result has been the succession of extreme weather seen around the world and exemplified by the present conditions in the US where there is record snowfall in one state and high, dry conditions in another leading to forest fire risk. As far as I am aware there was NO prediction of this profound effect on the weather from this aspect of climate change until AFTER the effect had been observed. Some scientists had even speculated that the reduced temperature differential between the equator and the pole would reduce storms and extreme weather, not causing blocking patterns that made them stick over a region for long enough to generate a Lance Armstrong climate with weather on steroids.
The models are not even represented prior to 1900, since they would not show the decline in temperature from 1880 or so, they have a rate of warming just over half the observed from 1910-1940, show slow warming during the cooling period after 1940, and match only the 1970-2000 warming.
They appear to have been selected and tuned to match that 1970-2000 warming rate, and sort of ‘curve fitted’ to the rest of the data back to 1900.
For an hypothesis to be considered valid, it really should match all the observations, not just a quarter or less.
“Computer says No” is a catchphrase from UK comedy “Little Britain”, about how bank workers are powerless to make correct/human decisions.
– is global warming in pause ? “Computer (model) says No !”
The plain truth. Excellent. The plain truth must be published every day until the IPCC is no more.
According to the models, we are experiencing, not a pause, but global cooling!!! We just have some extra heat in the oceans. That heat is maintaining temperatures.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=259
Arctic Oscillation seems strongly related to global rate of change of atm. CO2 but with considerable lag.
This may explain why the short segment from Barrow has greater variability.
The Arctic seems to play a key role in how much of our emissions get absorbed.
The IPCC seems intent on avoiding any [broader] analysis and is still trying to reduce everything to CO2 plus random stochastic “noise”.
This will certain be the in the AR* series. Though I doubt we’ve heard the last of their alarmist anti-science reports.
Clearly the oceans are a large, and little understood, player in the climate of the planet. The alarmists don’t actually claim that downwelling LW radiation heats the ocean directly, but that it prevents ocean heat from escaping to atmosphere (at a rate of 4 atomic bombs per second if Dana
and others are to be believed) by increasing the temperature gradient in the thin film surface layer,
which is less than 1mm thick. This apparently reduces the rate of conductive heat loss to atmosphere through the thin film layer.
Other than an experiment carried out by a NZ survey vessel some years ago showing that this mechanism exists with downwelling radiation from clouds (far more powerful than anything from CO2), I have never seen any calculations that show that this mechanism could be capable of causing the claimed current increase in ocean heat content, which Is extremely doubtful to say the least.
If someone more competent than me could do the calcs, It would provide a major rebuttal to the alarmists’ CO2/atomic bomb analogy!
GlynnMhor says:
The models are not even represented prior to 1900, since they would not show the decline in temperature from 1880 or so,
That’s a very good point. Also interesting to note that Hadley Centre already removed 2/3 of that variation with their diverse ‘bias corrections’.
judithcurry.com/2012/03/15/on-the-adjustments-to-the-hadsst3-data-set-2/
“The principal effect of these adjustments is to selectively remove the majority of the long term variation from the earlier 2/3 of the data record “
Watching the birds in your backyard is a good way to get a perspective on climate change. Compare your records from thirty or forty years ago with the birds showing up the last few years and you will see big changes.
Isaac Asimov in Vol. 2 of his three volume series “Understanding Physics”, wrote:
“…we are using a ‘model’ — that is, a representation of the universe which is not real, but which aids thinking. Scientists use many models that are extremely helpful. The danger is that there is always the temptation to assume, carelessly, that the models are real, so they may be carried beyond their scope of validity. There may also arise an unconscious resistance to any changes required by increasing knowledge that cannot be made to fit the model.”
“The extra infra-red radiation from the increasing atmospheric CO2 is absorbed in the top 2 millimetres of the ocean. “
It is impossible for mid-IR spectrum to significantly penetrate so deep into the water. The value is overestimated at least 1 order of magnitude.
Old’un says:
October 7, 2013 at 6:39 am
“”The alarmists don’t actually claim that downwelling LW radiation heats the ocean directly, but that it prevents ocean heat from escaping to atmosphere ”
Correction: The alarmists never suggested ANY such “mechanism” but just pointed out that the adjusted ARGO data OHC goes up while surface temperatures don’t and CO2 is rising; claiming then that this shows that “the heat is hiding in the deep ocean”.
As no mechanism at all has been represented by them, their claims are numerology or curve-fitting.
If they were right, it would of course fix all concerns about Global Warming, as the ocean has 1,200 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere, and we would therefore now have 120,000 years til the 2 deg C target is breached. Time for a lot of climate junkets and discussing technological fixes.
@- tumetuestumefaisdubien1
“It is impossible for mid-IR spectrum to significantly penetrate so deep into the water. The value is overestimated at least 1 order of magnitude.”
Pedantically true, but irrelevant given that the top two millimetres of the ocean are in continual turbulent mixing so that anything absorbed in the surface mono-molecular layer is rapidly distributed through the top two millimetres.
Otherwise the water surface ‘skin’ would boil off almost instantly….
Karl Drobnic says:
October 7, 2013 at 7:21 am
“Watching the birds in your backyard is a good way to get a perspective on climate change. Compare your records from thirty or forty years ago with the birds showing up the last few years and you will see big changes.”
Of what kind? I can tell you this from Germany, 30 years ago (1983) we had no snow in most winters. Now for the last 4 years we had very harsh snow-rich winters.
So, by extrapolating, can I expect a glaciation in 2050?
izen says:
October 7, 2013 at 5:08 am
“Another major failing of computer predictions was in the effect of the polar amplification in the Arctic weakening the N hemisphere jet stream. The result has been the succession of extreme weather seen around the world and exemplified by the present conditions in the US where there is record snowfall in one state and high, dry conditions in another leading to forest fire risk. As far as I am aware there was NO prediction of this profound effect on the weather from this aspect of climate change until AFTER the effect had been observed.”
Very good. A first step. Now add up all the other mispredictions by the models and tell us again why we should believe the IPCC one word of their conjecture about the future.
“The extra infra-red radiation from the increasing atmospheric CO2 is absorbed in the top 2 millimetres of the ocean. “
Even if this is true, the increased evaporation from the proposed higher film temp. leads to increased thunderstorm activity, greater albedo, and transportation of that extra heat into the stratosphere where it dissipates into space. Unlike immaculate convection, this process fits the evidence Willis has presented several times in several different ways over the past 4 years.
BC
Uncertainties world count found on the ipcc website using Google site search.
site:http://www.ipcc.ch/ “uncertainties” = 2,670 results
site:http://www.ipcc.ch/ “uncertain” = 1,800 results
site:http://www.ipcc.ch/ “poorly understood” = 180 results
————————–
Page search for the word “uncertainties” / “uncertain” in SPM AR5 = 30 mentions.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf
—————————
Global surface temperature has been at a standstill for 16+ years.
Now the IPCC climate scientists’ certainty has increased from 90% to 95% since 2007. It would be interesting to see AR6’s level of certainty if global surface temperatures fail to rise till then.
They got that covered Luke.
Why have a summary, and headlines??? Is it meant for the media? Nooooo, they wouldn’t do such a thing. Move along, nought to see here.