On occasion, comments posted on WUWT are backed up with data or graphs from the commenter, and are so germane that they merit their own post for discussion. This is one of those cases. Bill Illis has done a couple of guest posts on WUWT, the most recent about the “Trade Winds Drive the ENSO“. In the comments about the story on “When you can’t believe the model” he posted a significant comment on his work with NASA GISS model E (Global Climate Model) backed up with his own research graphs. For those brave enough to slog through it, here is the manual for Model E. I thought Bill’s comments were worth sharing. – Anthony
Image above is from my stock imagery and for illustration only, not from Bill Illis.
Guest Comments by Bill Illis
Awhile ago, I pulled apart the components of GISS’s Model-E and then extended the forecast it would have provided from 2003 (the end date of the data provided by GISS) to 2013, ten years.
The model would be off by about 0.15C in the first five years.
The more detailed version of this extension is here:
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The simpler version is below.
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Another way to look at is they have huge GHG temperature impacts built in (no way to get to +3.0C without it) but they need to build in almost as big negative temperature impacts from other sources to keep the hindcast close to the actual temperatures we have seen so far.
One could conclude they are just plugging the big negative numbers into the hindcast after the fact to make it work.
Which is close to the point Leland Teschler was trying to make in this article. (seen here)
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Without a large uptick in temperatures in the next few years, the modelers really have to go back to the drawing board (or they need to discover another “negative forcing” to keep the models on track to reality).
Great study!
Just eyeballing, it seems modelE is deviating from reality today more than it ever did in the hindcast. This puts paid to the realclimate crowd’s claims that the current cooling is just “weather”. The deviation between model and reality attributable to “weather” vs “climate” should be more-or-less stationary, so we’d expect no greater deviation today than in the past.
In other words, either the current deviation between model and reality is due to more than just weather – ie genuine cooling of the climate – or their model was drastically overfit. Either way, the realclimate crowd and the IPCC are wrong.
Re: Aerosols in the atmosphere leading to cooling.
As some of you may know, I follow the energy industry, and particularly the oil industry, pretty closely. The petroleum product that produces atmospheric aerosols much more than any other is jet fuel exhaust.
It is quite interesting that jet fuel production peaked in 2000 at around 1.6 million barrels per day, and has declined approximately 12 percent since then (U.S. data only, see below for link). As the U.S. produces approximately one-fourth of all refined products in the world, it may follow that world-wide jet fuel also has declined.
Perhaps one of the Gandalfs on WUWT can comment on this information wrt the aerosol component of the GCM. My wizardry is not sufficient for this task. But, if I understand what I have read thus far, aerosols counter the effect of CO2. If CO2 is steadily increasing, but aerosols are decreasing, then the global temperatures should rise significantly.
U.S. Jet fuel production from EIA is hereclick.
God does not play dice, humans have only the liberty to fool themselves playing a supposedly god´s game. These models are just X-Box or Playstation games played by grownups.
I don’t know anything about climate models and not much about climate (or solar) science, so probably got my facts/conclusions wrong. A few years ago I saw a science program (Horizon) on global dimming. If my memory is correct they said that during the last century the sunlight reaching the Earths surface had reduced (global dimming) as a result of manmade soot in the air, and in recent years the soot was reducing and the sunlight reaching the surface increasing. That seemed to make sense because I thought I had read that the Earths albedo had been reducing, then increasing about the same time. i.e. I thought the soot was absorbing sunlight, reducing albedo, causing global dimming and warming the atmosphere by absorbing the sunlight. And presumably the temperatures may fall if we are reducing soot (I believe they have levelled off or dropped in recent yeRS)?
The Horizon program (Hadley centre) came to the opposite conclusion; that the dominant effect of soot was helping the formation of more reflective clouds; reflecting more sunlight causing dimming and cooling which was offsetting the CO2 warming. Thus they concluded they had previously underestimated the CO2 warming effect, and as we reduce soot the warming will be even worse. I thought the dimming theory should mean the albedo should have been increasing when I thought the measurements (Earthshine/satellite data) showed it was reducing while we were dimming? And I thought I had seen research that showed that soot reduced clouds (by warming the air, making it harder for droplets to form).
I’ve probably got my facts wrong as I’ve not seen it discussed like this before (although I saw a month or 2 ago NASA were saying that reducing soot should help reduce temperatures, I couldn’t find more details – I was hoping it might have been discussed at WUWT). My understanding is that current climate models include the global dimming effect, i.e. assume atmospheric soot mostly cools.
Just wondering if anyone thought this could be a reason for the discrepancy; i.e. soot rather than CO2 caused a lot of the warming.
I’m also interested in solar affects. Did Leifs comments a month or 2 ago about the paper “Linkages between solar activity, climate…” (sunspots and rain in South Africa) mean he doesn’t believe it shows a link between sunspots and rain at that location? – sorry, I missed the discussions when the paper first came out. I don’t think Leif was impressed by graph 2? – MAR (mean average rainfall, I think?) vs years into the 21 year solar cycle, unfortunately it’s over a year since I read the paper, but at the very least does it not show that for the 5 consecutive cycles the rainfall was always below average at the end of the cycle and above average at the start? Isn’t the probability of that being more than coincidence too high to ignore? Or is their data/maths wrong? I thought they were saying the level of rainfall depended on how sunspots increased.
Probably not relevant, but about the same time there was some discussion about tides on the Sun; shouldn’t Leifs equation to calculate the tide include something for the properties (e.g. compressibility) of the object (Sun, planet etc), e.g. wouldn’t plasma have a different tidal bulge to solid rock or liquid water? I probably misunderstood?
yes, you didn’t post the final graph of Bill Illis (118439) . This graph seems to purport to show that we are on a ‘lower trajectory’ and the results are consistent with a climate sensitivity of about 1.62C. Of course it shows nothing of the sort; just the transient response.
See this post for a detailed analysis. Bill’s graphs in fact seems exactly consistent with the IPCC core preductions: 550ppmCO2 by 2060, 1.5C in reality plus another 1.5C in the pipeline; climate sensitivity of 3C for a doubling.