It has often been said that “Weather is not climate”, but ultimately it provides the only meaningful way to verify climate models. Did the climate models predict the cold, snowy weather which has been seen across much of the US?
According to NOAA, October was the third coldest on record in the US, with almost every state showing temperatures from one to ten degrees below normal. Some Parts of Colorado received record snowfall during October, starting the first week of the month.
Image from HPRCC – University of Nebraska at Lincoln
With a few days left, it appears that December is headed for a repeat, with temperatures ranging from one to fifteen degrees below normal. (Note that the color scale is different from October, now the greens show more negative departure, even South Texas is at -6F)
Image from HPRCC – University of Nebraska at Lincoln
Temperatures for the rest of the month are forecast by NCEP to be below normal for almost the entire country, so it is unlikely that the map will change much before New Years Day.
So let’s compare the complete Autumn temperatures vs. the forecasts from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. In August, CPC forecast that most of the US would have above normal temperatures from October through December, and perhaps more importantly did did not predict that any areas would have below normal temperatures.
As you can see below, their prediction was largely reversed from what has happened. Most of the country has seen below normal temperatures during the same period.
Image from HPRCC – University of Nebraska at Lincoln
So my question is – if the climate models can’t reliably predict the next three months, what basis do they have to claim their ability to forecast 100 years out? It is well known in the weather modeling community that beyond about three days, the models tend to break down due to chaos.
We have all heard lots of predictions of warmer winters, less snow, animal populations moving north, drought, dying ski resorts, etc. But did anyone in the climate modeling community forecast the cold, snowy start to winter which has occurred. If not, it would appear that their models are not mature enough to base policy decisions on.
On the other side of the pond, The Met Office forecast 2010 to be the warmest year ever, as they last did in 2007. On cue, the weather turned bitter cold immediately after the forecast and it appears that the unusally cold weather will continue at least through mid-January. As in 2007, the Met office 2010 forecast is not getting off to a good start:
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html
The Farmer’s Almanac is also predicting the opposite of the NOAA:
Alessandro (22:10:29) :
We need to stay on guard and question our assumptions.
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You have a good idea. The first assumption I will question is yours.
Alessandro,
Climate models are iterative. Once their results become incorrect, all subsequent results are flawed.
It is possible (through random probability) that they could come up with the correct answer at a later date, but nothing in the physical record indicates any reason to believe that temperatures will rise much more than 1C this century or that sea level will rise more than 30cm. Their predictions have vastly overreached and have a very low probability of coming true.
Looks like The Old Farmer’s Almanac wins again.
What do they know that Hansen and Mann don’t want to know?
Today, on the Weather Channel, they inteviewed a climate “engineer”. Apparently these people are planning ways to lower earth’s temperature such as by injecting SO2 into the atmosphere and other measures. Made my hair stand up at the thought that some idiot might actually propose to do something like that based on flawed data and TOTAL lack of understanding of the environment.
Alessandro (22:10:29) :
…a correct climate model *could* predict a general long term trend and fail to give us correct medium term predictions.
If we ever learn all the factors affecting climate *and* the range in their variables, that “correct” model would take those variables into consideration — the result should be a cover-all-the-bases *series* of predictions, shouldn’t it?
Of course by using the Stiegian method, of applying what happens in peninsulas which stick out into a warm ocean to the continent as a while, the winter thus far in the US has been about 2 degrees F above normal.
Prediction from Joe Bastardi for januari 1-10
Arctic blasts determine the weatehr in the US and Europe.
Temperatures comparable to the 70’s which means cold, very cold.
Many new records, snow and minimum temps will be set.
I don’t know if the following link has been posted here already. This Finnish newscast captures the Climategate story pretty well, and that’s no mean “trick”. It’s a complicated tale that requires a clear explication of the e-mails, interviews, science history, statistical references, etc.
The link was introduced at CA with a comment that there are many countries that now find their historical records of climate to be unrecognizeable after CRU handling.
This single story, imo, bears repeating and retelling in every language, til it silences the catastrophists. Whereupon, in my perfect world, reason will begin to creep back into the science.
Meanwhile, Diana DeGette, in today’s Denver Post, “Colorado’s Role in Addressing Climate Change”, is still gleefully spinning away:
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_14066987
I would not agree with the idea that the only way to verify climate predictions is by observing weather. Climate models predict climatology, weather models predict weather.
Climate can simply be defined as a statistical average of weather events, over relatively long periods (30 years seems to be what the world meteorological organization considers as long enough).
So the ouptut of climatic models should be compared to collections of weather-related measurements, not to single events. Imagine for example a random event where an integer can take the values 0 or 1 with equal probabilities. The average value (the “climatic” one) will be 0.5, but one will never observe 0.5 when sampling this random variable – however it would be inappropriate to say that the statistical prediction has “failed”. It’s like comparing apples to oranges (or vice versa).
The interesting thing to look at here would thus be the evolution of the average December temperature over the last 30 years.
On the good news side: it is possible skiers in the Winter Olympics will be able to, well, ski.
Whistler: base 218 cm
“Made my hair stand up at the thought that some idiot might actually propose to do something like that based on flawed data and TOTAL lack of understanding of the environment.”
rabidfox, someone already has – Tim Flannery (http://www.news.com.au/climate-plan-could-change-sky-colour/story-e6frfkp9-1111116384553)
Apparently, ” change is happening so quickly that mankind may need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive.”
It will be very interesting to see how the month of December shapes up on the official NASA stats for the global surface temperatures. Given it was an unusually cold month over most of the planet even going back decades, the December average must drop dramatically relative to the rest of the year. If it doesn’t it proves they are fudging the figures. So, let’s wait and see.
A cold winter is an ordeal for me, as I work outside. I prefer warm winters. However I will concede cold has a benefit, in terms of slapping some sanity back into politics.
I actually would not be surprised if this winter came out a bit above normal, due to the El Nino. However the Tweakers at places like GISS have cried wolf so many times that, even if they tell the truth, people will roll their eyes.
This is especially true because the lobes of cold seem nicely placed over population centers, “teleconnecting” over East Asia, Europe, and mid and eastern USA. Nature is a balance, and these lobes will be balanced out in other places, but the people in Tokyo, Paris and New York City aren’t going to want to hear about it, after wrestling with snow far more than they are used to. They are not going to want to hear it is .1 degree warmer, or that it is warmer at the poles. All they are going to want is springtime.
When it is coldest at the poles it is because a tight vortex keeps the cold trapped up there. The cold just swings around and around the poles, and there are few arctic outbreaks. This winter the hounds of winter have been unleashed, and lakes of frigid air are surging far south. So of course it will be warmer at the poles. The ice might even be a bit thinner up there, but, when ice is forming in the Hudson River, New Yorkers aren’t going to care about far-away ice on Greenland’s shores.
An interesting thing to consider is the albedo effect of having snow so far south. Even in southern places like Mississippi, where the snow usually melts away fairly swiftly, having snow cover for a few days must reflect a lot of sunlight which usually would be absorbed. Also snow cover enhances night-time radiational cooling, and low temperatures often drop by ten degrees or more.
Nature is a balance, and it may well turn out that having a warm El Nino and warm poles creates more snow cover, which reflects more sunshine, which balances everything out. However we are not suppose to feel reassured about nature’s ability to balance things out. Instead we are suppose to be in a panic about “tipping-points.”
New Yorkers may have reached a different tipping-point, however. The credulity of the public can only be stretched so far. If Hansen steps outside and starts to tell New Yorkers it is actually .1 degree warmer, I fear he may get a snowball right in his face.
Can we call global warmists….global cooling deniers now?
By all means. The evidence is clear. The planet has cooled over the past 10+ years on average if one includes the atmospheric readings.
Bill Parsons 23:52:09
Thank you for the link. A very interesting program. Maybe, one day, the likes of the BBC, NBC, ABC et al will be producing similar programs.
Slightly OT. Simon Heffer, a regular columnist in the Daily Telegraph, on Saturday under “And finally, you heard it here first…” gave his, tongue in cheek, 10 year, predictions:
The Queen will preparing for her platinum jubilee;…alcohol will have been accorded the pariah status of tobacco;…man-made global warming will be a belief of only nutters and extremists;…..
There were others on the list hence the …
Enjoy.
I remember feeling a similar shock when my own country of Thailand experienced some record low temperatures last year.
http://thainews.prd.go.th/en/news.php?id=255212120006
But that was when I was still taken in by GW propaganda.
Little fuss was made of this, yet the press love to talk about global warming whenever we get any natural disasters or high temperatures. I believe psychologists call this the “confirmation bias”.
As with predictions of economic success by the Obama administration, warm climate is always just around the corner, but never here.
They (NOAA) didn’t just get it wrong, they got it terribly wrong. And for all that, the head is still stuck in the hot sand theory. Rubber stamping out your current 2 weeks ahead as a photocopy of current conditions indicates analysis paralysis.
It would be far better to bow out giving no forecast at all than to continue appear as if groping in the dark, wandering aimlessly.
Would not the ‘tipping point’ in a glacial epoch be the conditions that return one to a warmer period, and the ‘tipping point’ in an Interglacial period be the conditions that return one to the next glacial epoch?
If the last 1 Million years says anything, that would be that the next ‘tipping point’ conditions are those that send the climate back to whence it last came from.
The last thing one would expect is that a trace gas which has always followed the climate changes would now drive them forcefully.
OT but how long has BBC World News weather been using a globe with both ice caps removed? It makes the earth look strangly… warmer
Fred (19:55:37) :
Apparently the Met office hasn’t yet gotten the prediction racket down pat.
I almost read that as “protection racket,” which they have got down pat. After all, their old supercomputers were known as the “Cray Twins.” ( The real “Kray Twins,” Ronnie and Reggie, were a couple of gangsters in London (UK))
kadaka (20:24:20) :
Hold up. I noticed something important.
Pennsylvania, see the lower-left spot of warming, stands right out. Where are they getting their readings?
See map of Pennsylvania. It looks like the spot is at Altoona, not much else around. What could be causing warming at Altoona?
What is at Altoona? Penn State Altoona. That’s right, Michael Mann’s Penn State, Altoona campus.
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It’s warmer there in both October and December. You could be on to something. This bears checking and watching.
RE: kadaka 20:24:20:
The anomaly shows up consistently in the “Departure from Normal” maps, but is not nearly so noticeable in the average temperature maps. That could be an artifact of the way the map is created or there may be yet more hanky-panky.
This really needs attention.
Good eye kadaka.
I don’t understand why they had to change the scaling on the Dec graphic other than a need to try to fool the average person. Often people just glance at a graph without looking at the scale. In this case, more green vs the Oct graph must mean that it wasn’t as cold, right? There doesn’t seem to be enough points <-10 to justify rescaling. They would have ended up with a couple of small hot pink regions but a very large blue region. Then apples could be compared to apples. Just another example of "Hide the decline".
Can the Dec graph be reproduced with Oct scaling?