Here’s something really interesting: two comparisons between model ensembles and 3 well known global climate metrics plotted together. The interesting part is what happens in the near present. While the climate models and climate measurements start out in sync in 1979, they don’t stay that way as we approach the present.
Here are the trends from 1979-”Year” for HadCrut, NOAA, GISSTemp compared to the trend based on 16 AOCGMs models driven by volcanic forcings:
Figure 1: Trends since 1979 ending in ‘Year’.
A second graph showing 20 year trends is more pronounced.Lucia Liljegren of The Blackboard did both of these, and she writes:
Note: I show models with volcanic forcings partly out of laziness and partly because the period shown is affected by eruptions of both Pinatubo and El Chichon.
Here are the 20 year trends as a function of end year:
Figure 2: Twenty-year trends as a function of end year.
One thing stands out clearly in both graphs: in the past few years the global climate models and the measured global climate reality have been diverging.
Lucia goes on to say:
I want to compare how the observed trends fit into the ±95 range of “all trends for all weather in all models”. For now I’ll stick with the volcano models. I’ll do that tomorrow. With any luck, HadCrut will report, and I can show it with March Data. NOAA reported today.
Coming to the rescue was Blackboard commenter Chad, who did his own plot to demonstrate +/- 95% confidence intervals using the model ensembles and HadCRUT. He showed very similar divergent results to Lucia’s plots, starting about 2006.
So the question becomes: is this the beginning of a new trend, or just short term climatic noise? Only time will tell us for certain. In the meantime it is interesting to watch.
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
Off topic…Replying to…
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.
Have you ever thought of doing some independent research rather than just picking up lies from blogs that suit your views?
It is true that the Stockholm Convention made exceptions for the use of DDT for disease control…However, the over-hyping of the dangers of DDT from the publication of Silent Spring to the US ban of DDT use in 1972 did lead to an environment in which the use of DDT was so discouraged that its use was effectively banned. Many African nations did stop using it and malaria deaths did skyrocket. Since 1999, South Africa and other African nations resumed dusting home interiors in mosquito-prone areas; and malaria deaths have plummeted.
On topic…
The reason that the climate models are so wrong is simple…They fail to properly account for water vapor and clouds. Every model assumes a positive feedback mechanism from water vapor. Yet, there is no empirical or observational evidence to support such a positive feedback mechanism. If anything, the observational evidence supports a negative feedback mechanism…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/05/negative-feedback-in-climate-empirical-or-emotional/
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
Where can we get a graph of model compared to reality on which each and every model adjustment is represented? I bet Lucia could produce such a graph. Come on Lucia, are you game?
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!
Is this related in any way to RC’s post attacking Pat Michaels and his charts?
MattB (07:36:36) :
hareynolds and others… there has never been an outright, total, worldwide ban on DDT.
Interesting; I did not know this. After the World Health Organization banned DDT, who (no pun intended) continued to use it?
BarryW,
That is a fascinating plot:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3623/3446920199_52496549cb_b.jpg
and gives an interesting extended perspective on the graphs in the article. Thanks for posting it.
The thirty-year trend is the one to look at – the twenty year trend is strongly aliasing the trend period – the peak are exactly twenty years apart!
Can you tell me the basis for calculating the trend from the HadCRUT data in these plots?
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/
Quoting:
“Lance,
Welcome to the club, not only with the NG but with dozens of publications of all sorts. That happened to me with National Public Radio back in 1994 and I started to question most everything I was told by most everyone.”
Commenting:
Me, too. NPR and Scientific American and the local fishwrap Houston Chronicle. I started reading on AGW to get the facts straight – but I find there’s no “there” there.
@ur momisugly 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)
Graeme Rodaughan (23:28:42) :
“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”.
Graeme,
All very much to the point.
In this regard I would like to refer to the Mockton letter that was send to The US House Committee with a copy to President Obama after his testimony.
The letter not only destroys the fiction of Global Warming but also points the finger to 50 cases of climate data fraud.
This is a bomb released and it’s effect will be noticed.
See:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/markey_and_barton_letter.pdf
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)
John Edmondson (01:29:34) :
I e-mailed the Met office some time ago about their model. There were a couple of interesting points. 1. There model could not be run backwards in time. 2. I got no sensible answer as to what would happen in they ran from 1600 AD (effectively the same as point 1 but asked differently)
> > Dear John,
> >
> > We do not run climate models with time going backwards
> > in a literal sense as climate models are complex numerical tools
> that
> > are definitely not designed for this purpose (an analogy being to
> try to
> > operate a car by injecting exhaust gases through the tail pipe and
> > expecting it to drive itself backwards and for petrol to accumulate
> in
> > the tank – clearly nonsensical).
Ho ho. Shoving exhause gases up the zoompipe of a motor car and having this result in the petrol tank soon overflowing would plainly be in absolute contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Achieving such ends is well outside the reach of mere mortals, who played no part whatsoever in the construction of these immutable Laws. (Or, at least, in their underlying substance). But mere mortals apparently have infinite control over the computer models they cook up so tirelessly. Wherein lies the problem?
Geoff Alder
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.
I personally think that the National Geo issue can be summed up into one of the printed letters to the editor.
The writer was looking out the window of her home and noting that the country around her was being ravaged. And went on to lament the destruction of our environment and its beauty.
I guess it was ok that the land was ravaged to build her home, but now that she has her’s, it is now wrong for others to build too.
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.
Climate dip or not, the sea-ice extent chart continues to laugh in the face of ice alarmists showing a virtual 3 way tie between this year, 2008, and 2003.
The newest SST data should ensure global temps. will not rise to levels above the peak several years ago for at least the next several months, the SST chart provided by NOAA looks like STT’s have just recently hit the next peak and starting to drop again particulary south of the equator.
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.
I’ve updated the chart extending GISS Model E by 10 years (from 2003 to 2013) for the newest temp data.
I’ve also built in a 0.1C decline for solar forcing given the state of the Sun. All the models will be building this in now.
The 2003 version of Model E would be off by 0.23C in just 5 years.
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/6594/modeleextramar09n.png
O/T But this is very interesting from Spaceweather, If someone has the time to provide a link to the original report.
The most powerful solar explosions are now moving in slow motion. “Lately, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have become very slow, so slow that they have to be dragged away from the sun by the solar wind,” says researcher Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab.
Each second in the SOHO animation corresponds to an hour or more of real time. “The speed of the CME was only 240 km/s,” says Vourlidas. “The solar wind speed is about 300 km/s, so the CME is actually being dragged.”
Vourlidas has examined thousands of CMEs recorded by SOHO over the past 13 years, and he’s rarely seen such plodding explosions. In active times, CMEs can blast away from the sun faster than 1000 km/s. Even during the solar minimum of 1996, CMEs often revved up to 500 or 600 km/s. “Almost all the CMEs we’ve seen since the end of April 2008, however, are very slow, less than 300 km/s.”
Is this just another way of saying “the sun is very quiet?” Or do slow-motion CMEs represent a new and interesting phenomena? The jury is still out. One thing is clear: solar minimum is more interesting than we thought.
Geoff Alder (09:36:08) :
> > We do not run climate models with time going backwards
> > in a literal sense as climate models are complex numerical tools
> that
> > are definitely not designed for this purpose (an analogy being to
> try to
> > operate a car by injecting exhaust gases through the tail pipe and
> > expecting it to drive itself backwards and for petrol to accumulate
> in
> > the tank – clearly nonsensical).
But mere mortals apparently have infinite control over the computer models they cook up so tirelessly. Wherein lies the problem?
The analogy supplied is an insufficient reason for not running a climate model in reverse. The only reason you should not be able to run it in reverse is non-linearity. Any (and all) linear process is reversible. Whomever explained this to the desk clerk either did not understand, or did not sufficiently explain this.
I would guess that most climate models are indeed non-linear and thus, wholly incapable of being run in reverse. I don’t know this for sure, however.
Mark
O/T
My eyesight is not what it was but is there a very small sun-speck at about 12 o’clock?
As Soon- being within two (2) years. furhter into Dalton-type (God help US if its a Maunder) minimum as I’m aready hearing about possible upper midwest
crop damage and possible failure…
(Documentaion forthcoming..)
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.