APS responds! – Deconstructing the APS response to Dr. Hal Lewis resignation

John Terry:
You say to me at October 14, 2010 at 4:07 pm :
“Richard t Courtney says
There is no “science behind AGW”. There is only hypothesis that has no supporting empirical evidence but is refuted by empirical evidence (e.g. the’hot spot’ is missing).
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/08/doing-it-yourselves/#more-4881
you’ll find that here. I hope you will now change your erroneous view in light of this new information.
Looking forward to reading your next post.”
OK. I looked at your link and it doesnot mentionthe missing ‘hot spot’ so I wonder why you think it refutes the evidence.
Anyway, I prefer the IPCC AR4 to any silly comments from that propoganda blog. The pertinent item is Chapter 9 and specifically Figure 9.1
The Chapter can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf
and its Figure 9.1 is on page 675.
The Figure caption says;
Figure 9.1. Zonal mean atmospheric temperature change from 1890 to 1999 (°C per century) as simulated by the PCM model from
(a) solar forcing,
(b) volcanoes,
(c) wellmixed greenhouse gases,
(d) tropospheric and stratospheric ozone changes,
(e) direct sulphate aerosol forcing and
(f) the sum of all forcings.
Plot is from 1,000 hPa to 10 hPa (shown on left scale) and from 0 km to 30 km (shown on right). See Appendix 9.C for additional information. Based on Santer et al. (2003a).
Only Figures 9.1(a) and 9.1(b) show the ‘hot spot’.
In other words, the ‘hot spot’ is a unique effect of “wellmixed greenhouse gases” predicted by the PCM model the IPCC approves. And that effect is so great that the model predicts it has overwhelmed all the other significant forcings.
But the ‘hot spot’ has not occurred, and this is indicated by independent measurements obtained by radisondes mounted on balloons (since 1958) and by MSU mounted on satellites (since 1979).
In other words,
IF ONE BELIEVES THE IPCC THEN THE ABSENCE OF THE ‘HOT SPOT’ IS A DIRECT REFUTATION OF THE AGW HYPOTHESIS.
I hope this post was worth waiting for and has removed your delusion.
And I think you would be wise to concentrate on your football career instead of demonstrating your ignorance of climate science.
Richard

Ooops.
I should have written;
“Only Figures 9.1(a) and 9.1(f) show the ‘hot spot’.”
Sorry.
Richard

Joel Shore:
At October 14, 2010 at 7:15 pm
you assert:
“To see whether amplification is predicted if you go up in the tropical troposphere, you have either have a smaller contour interval for the weaker forcings or you have to artificially magnify the strength of the weaker forcings (as was done here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ ). Then you find that the amplification is predicted for a variety of forcings, which isn’t surprising given that the physics in the models that cause it to occur is related to the fact that the temperature profile in the tropical troposphere is expected to closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate.”
OK. I will buy that. It says that the ‘hot spot’ would be induced by any increase to forcing from a varirty of cause including “wellmixed greenhouse gases” because “it results from the temperature profile in the tropical troposphere is expected to closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate.”
But the’hot spot’ is missing. As I said, the independent measurements from baloons and satelites both show it has not happened.
So, which do you want to assert:
1. As the IPCC explanation says, the absence of the ‘hot spot’ indicates there has been no increase to radiative forcing from “wellmixed greenhouse gases”?
Or
2. As the propoganda blog you quote says, the absence of the ‘hot spot’ indicates there has been no increase to radiative forcing from a “a variety of forcings” including “wellmixed greenhouse gases”?
Richard

John Terry:
At you make an assertion which demonstrates the truth of “fraudulent science” asserted by Hal Lewis and which the APS has not refuted. You assert:
“What is really interesting about this particular time is that if you take the anthroppoplogically emitted co2 out of the models then the climate would in fact be cooling slightly.”
So what? That only demonstrates what the models say. And a claim that the models’ indications provide information on the behaviour of the real climate system is demonstrably fraudulent.
It is certain that the climate models do not reproduce reality and are totally unsuitable for the purposes of future prediction (or “projection”) and attribution of the causes of climate change.
All the global climate models and energy balance models are known to provide indications which are based on the assumed degree of forcings resulting from human activity resulting from anthropogenic aerosol cooling input to each model as a ‘fiddle factor’ to obtain agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature.
This ‘fiddle factor’ is wrongly asserted to be parametrisation.
A decade ago I published a peer-reviewed paper that showed the UK’s Hadley Centre general circulation model (GCM) could not model climate and only obtained agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature by forcing the agreement with an input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling.
And my paper demonstrated that the assumption of anthropogenic aerosol effects being responsible for the model’s failure was incorrect.
(ref. Courtney RS ‘An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre’ Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999).
More recently, in 2007, Kiehle published a paper that assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models.
(ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007).
Kiehl found the same as my paper except that each model he assessed used a different aerosol ‘fix’ from every other model.
He says in his paper:
”One curious aspect of this result is that it is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity. The cited range in climate sensitivity from a wide collection of models is usually 1.5 to 4.5 deg C for a doubling of CO2, where most global climate models used for climate change studies vary by at least a factor of two in equilibrium sensitivity.
The question is: if climate models differ by a factor of 2 to 3 in their climate sensitivity, how can they all simulate the global temperature record with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Kerr [2007] and S. E. Schwartz et al.
(Quantifying climate change–too rosy a picture?, available at http://www.nature.com/reports/climatechange )
recently pointed out the importance of understanding the answer to this question. Indeed, Kerr [2007] referred to the present work and the current paper provides the ‘‘widely circulated analysis’’ referred to by Kerr [2007]. This report investigates the most probable explanation for such an agreement. It uses published results from a wide variety of model simulations to understand this apparent paradox between model climate responses for the 20th century, but diverse climate model sensitivity.”
And Kiehl’s paper says:
”These results explain to a large degree why models with such diverse climate sensitivities can all simulate the global anomaly in surface temperature. The magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing compensates for the model sensitivity.”
And the “magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing” is fixed in each model by the input value of aerosol forcing.
Kiehl’s Figure 2 can be seen at http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8167/kiehl2007figure2.png
Please note that it is for 9 GCMs and 2 energy balance models, and its title is:
”Figure 2. Total anthropogenic forcing (Wm2) versus aerosol forcing (Wm2) from nine fully coupled climate models and two energy balance models used to simulate the 20th century.”
The graph shows the anthropogenic forcings used by the models show large range of total anthropogenic forcing from 0.8 W/m^2 to 2.02 W/m^2 with each of these values compensated to agree with observations by use of assumed anthropogenic aerosol forcing in the range -0.6 W/m^2 to -1.42 W/m^2. In other words, the total anthropogenic forcings used by the models varies by a factor of over 2.5, and this difference is compensated by assuming values of anthropogenic aerosol forcing that vary by a factor of almost 2.4.
Anything can be adjusted to hindcast obervations by permitting that range of assumptions. But there is only one Earth, so at most only one of the models can approximate the climate system which exists in reality.
The underlying problem is that the modellers assume additional energy content in the atmosphere will result in an increase of temperature, but that assumption is very, very unlikely to be true.
Radiation physics tells us that additional greenhouse gases will increase the energy content of the atmosphere. But energy content is not necessarily sensible heat.
An adequate climate physics (n.b. not radiation physics) would tell us how that increased energy content will be distributed among all the climate modes of the Earth. Additional atmospheric greenhouse gases may heat the atmosphere, they may have an undetectable effect on heat content, or they may cause the atmosphere to cool.
The latter could happen, for example, if the extra energy went into a more vigorous hydrological cycle with resulting increase to low cloudiness. Low clouds reflect incoming solar energy (as every sunbather has noticed when a cloud passed in front of the Sun) and have a negative feedback on surface temperature.
Alternatively, there could be an oscillation in cloudiness (in a feedback cycle) between atmospheric energy and hydrology: as the energy content cycles up and down with cloudiness, then the cloudiness cycles up and down with energy with their cycles not quite 180 degrees out of phase (this is analogous to the observed phase relationship of insolation and atmospheric temperature). The net result of such an oscillation process could be no detectable change in sensible heat, but a marginally observable change in cloud dynamics.
However, nobody understands cloud dynamics so the reality of climate response to increased GHGs cannot be known.
So, the climate models are known to be wrong, and it is known why they are wrong: i.e.
1. they each emulate a different climate system and are each differently adjusted by use of ‘fiddle factors’ to get them to match past climate change,
2. and the ‘fiddle factors’ are assumed (n.b. not “estimated”) forcings resulting from human activity,
3. but there is only one climate system of the Earth so at most only one of the models can be right,
4. and there is no reason to suppose any one of them is right,
5. but there is good reason to suppose that they are all wrong because they cannot emulate cloud processes which are not understood.
Hence, use of the models is very, very likely to provide misleading indications of future prediction (or “projection”) of climate change and is not appropriate for attribution of the causes of climate change.
In other words, your claim is meaningless except that your claim is an example of the “fradulent science” which Hal Lewis deplores.
Richard