90 climate model projectons versus reality

Is this the 97% consensus? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Another juicy jewel to provide to my growing circle of layman skeptics.

The typo in the title gave me an idea. “Projectons” must be the hypothetical quantum particle simulated in the models to give them a little lift.

Does the “Like this” work? I didn’t see any evidence that my clicks got counted. I refreshed after clicking them, and nothing changed.

It appears that 97% of climate models CAN in fact be wrong.
Nah
It indicates that the current measurements still fall within Modeled Ranges
Nah
It really indicates that 97% of climate models really are wrong

Notice that the model runs do indicate pauses and short cooling periods. They don’t agree on when these occur after about 2000. That’s why in the average you don’t see pauses. But in the individual runs you do.
The models likely do not include changes in solar irradiation, volcanic activity, China’s increase in SO2 emissions, the reduction in CFC emissions or the Great Recession. That we don’t have good ways of modeling the el Nino/la Nina cycle is unfortunate. But if AGW is false, shouldn’t we have had some cooling periods this decade like in the 90s? Where did the cooling go? Isn’t it a travesty that you cannot find the cooling? It cannot be hiding in the oceans because they have still been warming.

This just makes me laugh, especially when this article appeared in the news today.
http://news.ca.msn.com/local/calgary/world-temperatures-go-off-the-chart-by-2047-study-says-3

Maybe another came up with that idea before Dr. Roy Spencer 😉

There are 3 words that Warmists hate to see in the same paragraph. These 3 words can cause intolerable mental conflict.
*Projections, *observations, *comparisons.
At one of the IPCC insiders’ meetings they knew full well that there was a problem. Some bright spark must have suggested that they simple pluck a new confidence number out of thin air otherwise they would be doomed (and shamed). Desperate times call for desperate measures. Just look at the graph. You won’t see this kind of behavior in any other science.

I would say 100% are wrong. The fact that 2 or 3 haven’t overshot the temperature doesn’t make them right. They aren’t following the observed temperature. It’s clear that none of them simulate the actual climate.

shenanigans24 “They aren’t following the observed temperature. ”
By eyeball it seems you could model the multi-model ensemble reasonably well by simply drawing a pair of lines between {1992, 1993} and 1998.

steven says:
October 14, 2013 at 2:22 pm
The typo in the title gave me an idea. “Projectons” must be the hypothetical quantum particle simulated in the models to give them a little lift.
========================================================
ROTFL. Love it!
We know they have “spin,” What other properties can be deduced from the
observed behaviour?
Spin orientation (up? down? around?)
Charm?
Color?
(In)stability?
Half life? .

In my biz we’d call this a high bias …… To protect the public health.
Can anyone tell me why a half a degree is harmful to the public health? (That question is largely rhetorical.)
The important question …. Why are the models so wrong?

I’m still confused why we care about HADCRUT. I thought WUWT demonstrated that half the “warming” came from bad ground stations and other fudge factors. I also thought another article on WUWT demonstrated that that HADCRUT takes advantage of some bad mathmatics to suppress temperatures early than 1960, especially the high temps of the 1940s.

richardscourtney says:
October 14, 2013 at 4:50 pm
You are one fine educator. Thanks again for your valuable work.

Reblogged this on Power To The People and commented:
Wonder if David Suzuki, Michael Mann, Tom Steyer , Al Gore or President Obama will ever admit that when reality does not agree with their Catastrophic Climate Change Theory reality is not what’s false. hattip Vahrenholt

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. wrote,
“. . .
So, about 95% (actually, 96.7%) of the climate models warm faster than the observations. While they said they were 95% certain that most of the warming since the 1950s was due to human greenhouse gas emissions, what they meant to say was that they are 95% sure their climate models are warming too much.
Honest mistake. Don’t you think? Maybe?”

– – – – – – – –
Roy,
Thanks for your droll humor. It cheers the heart.
If their models came with a money back guarantee, the modelers would be in the red, honestly. No maybe about it . : )
John

By the models’ logic aerosol is the answer to combating AGW. While cutting down CO2 emission would cost trillions and at best a century to see any effect. By increasing aerosol emission the effect is immediate and costs nothing to promote except relaxation of regulations.
(jk)

Jimbo says: “I wouldn’t be surprised if the 90 climate models…increases to 150….”
I was thinking the same thing. We need more climate models. Then one of them might accidentally get the fit right.

Jquip says:
“By eyeball it seems you could model the multi-model ensemble reasonably well by simply drawing a pair of lines between {1992, 1993} and 1998”
I’m quite sure that’s what they did. Hansen had his epiphany, they looked at the temperature over a few years and declared it would rise at that rate forever. It’s like if it rained two inches one day so you just assume it will continue at that rate for 100 years.

I do my best at following this all this; everyone needs to be absolutely sure on the data/statements. Why are there only two lines under the observed data when the graph states three; why not 97.8-percent?

Canman: “Were they tuned to that pre-98 “W” or did they predict it?”
I’d assume they were tuned on it. Everything thereafter being what happens when you get off the far end of a Taylor series.
Assume that’s not the case: Then the models are actually damn good, within various limitations. But necessarily they require real measurables plugged in for them to reach damn good. Or they wouldn’t fit nice back then and go ‘derp’ in the recent now and beyond. As such, they cannot predict climate not because they are broken as such. But because they rely on an unpredictable measurable. For example, the recent postings about failing to predict the AMO.
One case leaves hope open. Both cases toss out any idea that there’s predictive validity in them.

Well not to worry Dr Roy, it seems that past numbers are always too high, and GISS and others seem to like to “adjust” the past observed and recorded data downwards, to keep it in general agreement with present day model requirements.
So pay no attention to all that high data observed in the year 2028, because by 2078, all that bloated stuff will be suitably corrected down to then prevailing terraflop computer models.

@ Werner. You make a good point. I would have thought that Hadcrut 4 is suspect and its use a poor choice. Perhaps Roy Spencer is in a position where he needs to make some concessions to whatever the prevailing political correctness is. Perhaps he hasn’t compared hadcrut 3 and 4. Perhaps he feels that he can better make his point against the warmists by using their own (flawed) data sets.

I can’t see The Pause in the observational data. Why?

Ah, I see now, we are talking about a 5 year running mean. Sorry for asking the obvious.

And that despite most of the time, there was additional warming from the PDO warm half cycle.
Around 2030, after the cold half cycle, temperatures may then end well below 1/3 of model predictions, equaling a sensitivity of below 1 deg.

Richard,
No I didn’t read your post. They do often make a lot of sense but now and then they have a strong element of pettifoggery, like in this case.
You write:
“But that does NOT indicate that the “3 out of 90 models did a good job”.
And it does NOT indicate that there was anything “they did right”.
And it does NOT indicate “they were right” for any reason (be it right or wrong).”
You make a big deal of a cursory question (you are a bit of a selfrighteous p…k, I have noted, as if you are the moderator or the CEO on this site. I am on my guard when your posts start with “Friends”, I am not your friend). I am not saying or indicating that what they do is intrinsically right. I didn’t add for nothing that they may well be right (meaning that the outcome is more or less in line with observations, because that’s what I meant with “right” or “with a good job”) for the wrong reasons.
I am just curious to know which input parameters have made these 3 models end up close to what was observed in terms of surface temperatures; indeed in what way do they differ from the other 87 definitely wrong models. Just by handwaving and assuming, as you do, that these models “coincidentally approximated reality” does not satisfy my curiosity. It is as simple as that.

Richardscourtney,
No I didn’t read your post. They do often make a lot of sense but now and then they have a strong element of pettifoggery, like in this case.
You write:
“But that does NOT indicate that the “3 out of 90 models did a good job”.
And it does NOT indicate that there was anything “they did right”.
And it does NOT indicate “they were right” for any reason (be it right or wrong).”
You make a big deal of a cursory question (you have a tendency to be selfrighteous, I have noted. I am on my guard when your posts start with the pretentious “Friends”. Yes guru, we are listening to your wise words). I am not saying or indicating that what they do is intrinsically right. I didn’t add for nothing that they may well be right (meaning that the outcome is more or less in line with observations, because that’s what I meant with “right” or “with a good job”) for the wrong reasons.
I am just curious to know which input parameters have made these 3 models end up close to what was observed in terms of surface temperatures; indeed in what way do they differ from the other 87 definitely wrong models. Just by handwaving and assuming, as you do, that these models “coincidentally approximated reality” does not satisfy my curiosity. It is as simple as that.

Dr Roy Spencer wrote,
“Reality wins, it seems.”

– – – – – – – –
Roy,
Reality.
What of the intellectual leadership of the IPCC Bureau’s ideology whose concept of science allows the models to be counter-observational and still be valid? I suggest some at first just ghostly turned a whiter shade of pale***.
*** Procol Harum
John

Condo be worse. The Global Warmistas could have gone into medical research, in which case there would be mountains of dead people who received incorrect treatments based on their theoretical understanding of science.
All they have really done is torqued public policies and squandered something just south of $2Trillion of public money on useless gree schemes, scams, cons and gifts.
That money would have purchased a lot of research for a cancer cure, better schools, upgrading infrastructure and helping developing nations. You know, useful stuff.
But nooooooooooooo, the Warmistas decided they were smarter than everyone else, smarter than Mother Nature and that their kindergarten level theories were infallible.
Quite the legacy they will leave, a legacy of blind adherence to their quasi Religous Eco Greenie ideas, of eliminating conflicting data, of operating personal smear campaigns to cover up their scientific malfeasance.
History will be very unkind to The Team et al. Mikey Mann could be the poster boy for courses taught to Freshmen science students about what not to do, to be aware of pride getting between scientific process and personal political and religous beliefs.
I would suggest the Warmista problem be summarized in the future as Mann Falling Sky Syndrome.

richardscourtenay
Never heard of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, but you are quite right to discount the wider significance of 2-3 reasonable fits out of 90 tries. Its a familiar problem which arises in many applications of statistics, sometimes called ‘data-mining’ or other names. Researchers carry out a number of experiments or whatever, looking for the result they want. When they succeed on eg. the 90th try, they attach the same statistical significance to the outcome as if it had come from a single experiment. Of course, the probability of heads in 90 spins of a coin is way greater than the probability of a head on one spin. So success on 2-3 out of 90 is most unlikely to be of any significance without a lot of other evidence.

Richard, I don’t think neither Ferd nor I suggested that the 2 or 3 models are right. Simply that these 2 or 3 have not been shown to be wrong.
As I implied before, rejecting them solely on the grounds that other models are wrong is foolish.

Before drawing any conclusions from this chart, I would ask the following questions:
1. Which RCP scenario is being fed into the models?
2. How closely does the chosen scenario resemble the actual observed concentrations to date?
3. What are the OLS trends for each of the model projections and the observations along with their 95% confidence ranges (after correcting for auto correlation)?
4. To what degree do the confidence ranges overlap?
5. How robust is the analysis to different start years?

f that is a reasonable statement of the IPCC’s view of the models included in their report then the certainty of the future calculated by the models in the SPM do appear overstated as many have pointed out. What occurs to me is the IPCC can just say, in the face of criticism, something like (my words) => ‘we are being reasonably pre-cautious on the safe side in showing more future warming until, in the indefinite future, we finally get the models right.
Just looking for were the IPCC’s CAGW hockey puck is going to be come January 2014.
Your comment?
PERSONAL REQUEST. => rgb, what is the status of your book ? You have mentioned in previous comments over the past year or so that you are working on (IIRC) a book on epistemic subjects.
Yes, the IPCC could indeed say something like this. If the authors of its reports wanted to be brought before congress and charged with contempt of congress as the preferable and civilized alternative to being attacked by an angry mob armed with pitchforks and torches.
This would be basically saying “We’ve been lying to you from the beginning, but it is for your own good, maybe, because we could have turned out to be right.”
At times like these, I like to trot out a few lines from Feynman’s Cargo Cult address:
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
The removal of the lines clearly stating reasonable doubt from AR5’s SPM — is that the mark of good, honest science? Is failing to point out that the GCMs’ GASTA predictions alone are already in poor agreement with facts, let alone all the other parts of this quintessentially complex theory that don’t fit, the mark of good, honest science?
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing– and if they don’t support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.
I would think that the same principle would apply to people who claim that their research is going to “save the world” to guarantee the continuation of what has grown to become one of the world’s fattest funding trees — provided, of course, that your proposed work is looking into anthropogenic global warming (that is, provided that you’ve already begged the question that AGW exists). Is the vast research infrastructure that has been built to study the climate and predict its future capable of surviving a “never mind, sorry, we got it wrong, there probably won’t be any catastrophic AGW after all” moment? Is it capable of the scientific honesty required to commit public seppuku, to literally spill its guts in expiation of the hundreds of billions of dollars misspent and the millions of lives being lost per year all due to the artificial inflation of carbon based energy prices?
Even if it were, will it be given the chance? For a scientist you are right — saying “I was wrong” is a part of honest science. For a politician who supported the incorrect scientific conclusion and wasted our hard earned money and quite possibly contributed to the recent depression and near-collapse of the Euro, there are no second chances. Expect the tail to wag the dog, because the tail is in control of everything from funding streams to an entire network of media devoted to controlling public opinion and perception. Why do you think that they rewrote AR5’s SPM, the same way that they rewrote AR4’s SPM, after the actual scientists were done with it? Because if the SPM honestly stated the uncertainties, the IPCC would never have been more than a tiny, nearly irrelevant UN structure devoted to predicting and ameliorating things like the southeast asian monsoon, and the world’s poorest people would have far cheaper energy. Even the energy companies benefit from the panic that has been created. It has “forced” them to raise their prices, and their profits are margins on those prices. They don’t lose money because of CAGW, they make it!
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.
I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
Where is the evidence that the people running the GCMs have ever “tested their theories”? When I glance at figure 1.4 of AR5’s SPM, can I pick out model results that nobody sane would consider not to have been falsified by the actual data? I can, easily. There are model results at the very top of the spaghetti envelope that are never anywhere close to the data. Why are they still there in the first place, contributing to the “meaningless mean” of all of the model results? Instead of openly acknowledging that these models, at least, have failed and throwing them out, they are included for the sole reason that they lift the meaningless mean of many GCMs, indeed, lift it a LOT as outliers.
A lowered mean would be in better agreement with observation (and still would be meaningless as the average of many models is not a predictor of anything other than the average of many models according to the theory of statistics) but it would weaken all of the political arguments for expensive and pointless measures such as “Carbon Taxes” that bring great profit to selected individuals and will not, even according to their promoters, solve the climate problem by ameliorating CO_2 in the foreseeable future.
We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
What more can one say? AR5 has now “officially” bet the farm on its SPM. Everybody knows that the draft openly acknowledged the fact that the models are not working and contained a now-infamous figure that allowed any non-technical reader to see this for themselves. Everybody knows that this acknowledgement was removed in the official release, and that the figure in 1.4 was replaced by a figure that fairly obviously obscured the obvious conclusion — shifting and renormalizing the axes so that the data divergence was less obvious, replacing colored ranges with a plate full of incomprehensible spaghetti so that one can see that some colored strands spend some of their time as low as the actual climate.
At this point they are at the absolute mercy of Nature. In two years, in five years, in ten years, either Nature will cause GASTA to shoot back up by 0.5C or so all at once so that it starts to correspond with the GCM predictions, or it won’t. If it doesn’t — worst case for them, if GASTA remains constant or actually descends (and there are some halfway decent reasons to think that it might well descend even without the use of GCMs at all, and they are not unaware of this and there are signs that the climate community is starting to break ranks on this) then they are done. The temporary fame and excitement that brought Michael Mann to the foreground as the cover story of many books will be replaced by ignominy, congressional investigations, and yes, pitchforks and torches and now they cannot back out of the latter because the changes in AR5’s SPM will be damning proof that climate science has been good old fashioned cargo cult science for two decades now, benefitting nobody but the high priests and politicians leading the cult.
IMO this is unfortunate. Not all climate science has been dishonest. The actual scientific reports from the working groups have been a lot more open about uncertainties (although they too have suffered from political rewriting after the fact to eliminate some of this before the reports were allowed to go public). And I’m certain that a lot of research has been done in the best of faith. But when one is funded to do research on and report on how CAGW is going to affect the migratory behavior of species, you aren’t going to return an answer of “it isn’t” or an answer qualified by “IF AGW turns out to be a correct hypothesis”, you’re going to return an answer of “here are the expected effects given an assumed warming of X”. Bayes might as well never have lived.
Finally, as regards my book Axioms, it is still being written, unfortunately. I’ve finished maybe half of it (and am pretty happy with that half) but the second half is the “messy” part of analyzing things like religion and ethics and I tend to rant too much and write too long every time I dig into it. I’m also insanely busy, and Axioms is just one of a dozen things on the back burner as I’m teaching a large class in physics, trying to fix up and improve my textbooks, get a startup company to take off so I can earn enough wealth in the process to be able to do whatever I like for the rest of my professional career, and get kids through college and launched. But it is near and dear to my heart. You can always go and grab the last image I uploaded before I quit working on it at:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/axioms.pdf
This part does a fair job of working through elementary axiomatic metaphysics to where one has a defensibly “best” basis for epistemology and ontology, for a worldview, but one that is flexible enough to accommodate both some personal choice in what to believe and to accommodate the imperfect and incomplete and constantly changing description of “probable best belief” concerning propositions about the real world.
Enjoy, at least so far.
rgb

rgbatduke on October 16, 2013 at 9:42 am

– – – – – – – – –
rgbatduke,
Thank you for your reply. It is going to become a classic WUWT inline comment, I think.
When Feynman was alive I never met him personally or saw his talks live. My loss.
I will look at what you’ve written so far of ‘Axioms’.
Over the last year or so in comments you several times have recommended Thompson Jaynes’ book ‘Probability Theory: The Logic of Science’. I have located a copy at a local university library to which I have access . . . that will be slow reading . . . I expect a lot of heavy statistical lifting in it even with my engineering focused statistics education. : )
John

rgbatduke on October 16, 2013 at 1:29 pm

– – – – – – – –
rgbatduke,
I think there is now no doubt you are a university educator with all the assigned homework opportunities to me! : )
Especially thanks for the free online link to Jaynes’ book. It’s much more convenient than hardcover.
John