Diminishing returns on climate models

Thank you Dr. Pielke for this interesting commentary.
Also, the more I read Dr Curry’s blog posts, the more I like them. I think she is both articulate and courageous, in the scientific sense.

Think Ale Gorney has had a bit much ale?

This is all fine and well, but it doesn’t matter how refined the models get if they are still founded on guesswork and erroneous assumptions – the key one being that increased water vapour is positive feedback.
Jimmy – another sub-zero night in your old home town last night – clear skies but all that extra CO2 up there didn’t bounce the warmth back for some reason…

Commenters have ignored the obvious benefits of doing science with a computer:
1) the climate inside is stable – not too hot/cold, never wet and you get to sit in a cumfy chair
2)you don’t burn fossil fuel (electricity generation for the lab is wind powered – if you’re a real enthusiast you’ll use a bicycle generator on calm days) on pointless data gathering /quality control exercises.
3)you know the conclusions are going to be politically correct because you wrote the program

vukcevic says:
November 6, 2010 at 2:34 am
You are so right!
Have you noticed a 1.25 billion year gap from the first Ice Age until the current cycle of Ice Ages?
The first must have been a massive meteor strike in the ocean as evaporation was not in process until the cycle of Ice Ages.
Rotation and centrifugal force was too fast to allow the chemical composition to the current salt water we see today. As the planet slows, it throws off salt to become fresher and fresher. This is needed to happen for evaporation to work. Too much salt would generate deserts as evaporation would be hindered.

The above graph was intuitively obvious to scientists who grew up doing real physical experiments with real physical measuring tools and real physical sliderules. We’re only arguing about it now because most currently active scientists have grown up with digital modeling and digital calculators, which give you the illusion that the 100th decimal place is just as valid as the 1st.

How many times do we hear from the disciples of AGW that climate predictions are more accurate than weather predictions (or words to that effect)?
No one seems to challenge this concept. It’s just stated as fact, even though it can’t be tested. One of the strategies of the propagandist is to keep repeating an opinion as if it were an undeniable truth.
Next time some one tries this stunt on you, ask them how they know the statement to be true. They will nearly always say something like ‘cos so and so told me.
With the passage of time we can usually predict with reasonable accuracy single events within a given time frame, but not the outcome of interconnected linear and nonlinear events at specific time within a given time frame.
Computer models can only give projections based on known data and because the data is constantly changing as each aspect of the model is given new parameters by field researchers, they can never give better results than projecting the past into the future.
In other words they can only tell us what we already know. They can’t predict what we don’t know.
The weather and the climate are equally unpredictable because they both are based on what happened in the past and our understanding of all the conditions past can never be complete. Even if they were, future conditions can never mirror the past.

Maybe it’s time to step back from modeling and return to science? Or would that mean having to actually explain methodology in a manner that the taxpayer could actually understand. Now there’s a scary notion. Or maybe climate scientists are happy to go along with the idea the public are too dumb to understand the detail (well the detail that’s released) but smart enough to keep funding it all.
I think an Emperor’s got no clothes moment is coming along.
Here the in the UK the media are repositioning themselves with programs like ‘What the Green Movement Got Wrong’ on ITV. The BBC have gone completely silent on global warming recently.
In my humble opinion one more hard, cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere would kill AGW once and for all and I foresee a lot of folk who have made a good living out of AGW scrambling around trying to find a position that would save their salaries in this winter’s wilderness of government cutbacks.

If the funds spent on conventional models are no longer producing proportionate returns in terms of the advancement of climate science then it’s time for a bit of lateral thinking.
I hereby put forward the development and testing of my New Climate Model as a deserving project for substantial funds and personnel support.
Any offers ?

The negative implication of this is that they have pretty well described reality.
The positive implication is that they are stuck in a GIGO loop and are not going to get better until some of the assumptions and givens are corrected.
I choose the latter.

Membership in the National Science Foundation needs to be restricted to High-School Graduate Grandmothers with at least 4 children and 8 grandchildren, who were married to “worthless-substance-abuse-addicts-who-couldn’t-hold-a-decent-job”, who had to hold down a full-time job themselves, who now live in a decent paid off home of their own, who drive a decent car, and who have family reunions every year where the whole clan shows up. Either that or- cut the NSF budget by 30% each year for the next two years, and do away with it altogether in FY13.

The climate models are all going to make a certain prediction for 2050.
Because in 2050, they are al constructed to have 3.0 watts/m2 of extra energy held in at the tropopause because of the assumed increase in CO2/GHGs. They will all then build-in a 10% to 15% increase in water vapour levels which holds even more energy in – another 5.0 to 6.0 watts/m2.
They can be improved, the resolution can be increased and atmospheric processes can be modelled more accurately but it is not going to change the fact that there is an assumed net increase of 9.0 watts/m2 of energy held in at the tropopause.
The improved models are still going to predict warming. It is the theory that has to be tested. We have to find out what really happens when there is increased CO2/GHGs – we have to “measure” it rather than continue modeling it in exactly the same way.
The chart at the top is right about diminishing returns, but we were already at the flat part of it 22 years ago with Hansen’s 1988 model.

Jimmy Haigh:
Ian E:
Mike Jowsey:
Aw, quit picking on Ale Gorney. His comment stands on its own.
Let’s just leave him alone and let him sleep it off. He’ll be ok in the morning.

I agree with Dr. Pielke Sr., that wasting further money on producing ever more useless computer climate models should be stopped.
At best the models are useful for learning about how climate mechanisms work. At worst they are being used to give the impression to policy makers that more is known about climate than is the case and that models can be used to predict possibilities about what will happen to future climate, which is clearly false.

Mike says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:41 am
Let’s cutoff funding for cancer and AIDS research. I mean what’s the point, we are going to die anyway.
Cancer and AIDS are real problems that shorten the human lifespan.
Catastrophic AGW is a fiction used by phony scientist and Marxist ratbags to fleece the public and destroy wealth.

Adam Gallon says:
November 6, 2010 at 1:48 am
Ah, time to pass that over to Dr mann, to invert & rotate that proxy, then the graphed results will look just right!
Do you mean something like this hockey sticky one?
inverted & rotated

Hopefully, the NSF (and other agencies) will soon realize that most of this funding is a waste of taxpayers money and could be better spent on other research uses in climate and elsewhere.

There’s a slightly higher probability that congress will defund the NSF. In either case though, the probability is still very low.

Mike says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:41 am
“Let’s cutoff funding for cancer and AIDS research. I mean what’s the point, we are going to die anyway.”
I have an even better suggestion. Let’s cut off funding for redundant climate modeling research (I’ll let the climate scientists decide which models are the crappy and/or superfluous ones) and give that money to cancer and AIDS research…

Max Hugoson says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:02 am
I do not doubt that human activity affects local climate as in cities and their environs or even that agriculture, irrigation etc. can affect climate on a regional scale: what I do doubt is that this any perceptible effect globally.
I have no use for these models, because unlike a weather model where, more or less, the forecasters get the result of their predictions within a day or so and can adjust their techniques accordingly, learning what works and what does not on the way as it were, climate models cannot be tested. And an ability to hindcast for which they are tweaked and twiddled is no guarantee of their predictive power which turns out to be zero. As somebody sagely observed if the models worked then you would only need ONE model.
Moreover few seem to understand that whichever way you care to look at it, from classical physics, to mechanistic assumptions to information theory the sheer scale of the repetitive data process handling in these models means that the degradation and increase in noise with every step forward they could not predict beyond the short term, years, if that.
Some scientists are fond of saying that due to the models we know more about the climate fifty years hence than a few years ahead, either they are woefully ignorant of physics and mathematics, or being deliberately disingenuous.
As to clouds, here in the hills over which I love to walk there is one, about 1300 ft which has a nearly sheer drop into the sea on one side. On a sunny. warm, windless day some years ago, with the sea like a mirror, I watched a cloud form on it’s seaward side from about two miles away. It started as tiny puff of white the size of a child’s hand halfway up the hillside and grew upwards and outwards at a terrific rate so that within half an hour or so it had become a massive cloud formation towering up to many thousands of feet. It was fascinating to watch.
Kindest Regards

It seems that there is a straw man argument implicit in this. Putting more funding in for bigger and better models does not mean that climate scientists are abandoning observation of the real world. The problem is that it will be hard to find funding for either sort of initiative.
After the fiasco of the Lindzen and Choi paper, where Lindzen ignored a lot of real world data which showed positive feedback of clouds, used the wrong models, ignored the horizontal flow of energy due to winds in his study of whether data and climate models agreed, Professor Lindzen hardly qualifies as an authority on the validity of climate models. In fact, the data that Lindzen had showed agreement with the commonly used climate models, contrary to the conclusion that he came to in his paper with Choi.
Lindzen claims he has written a correction to the paper which he is trying to publish.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/11/science-lindzen-debunked-again-positive-negative-feedbacks-clouds-tropics/
” The LC09 results are not robust….
LC09 misinterpret air-sea interactions in the tropics….
More robust methods show no discrepancies between models and observations….
LC09 have compared observations to models prescribed with incomplete forcings….
LC09 incorrectly compute the climate sensitivity.”

Ale Gorney says:
November 6, 2010 at 12:54 am
This stie is the defintieiotn of dimishing returns.. I watch it and observe, calculate and know.. damn all of you. Looking back it was easy.. agree? *SHAKING MY HEAD*
IT IS EASY
Here we are…. together, hands joined to fight the good fight but will you remember ? 3 months from now… will your thoughts be lucid of what you see and KNOW?
REMEMBER WHAT YOU SEE.
========================================================
The preceding public service announcement was brought to you by
The Friends of Prop 19

Ellecent idea listed earlier, stop funding useless computer modelling and use funds to correct problems with the weather stations, especially the high arctic stations. Now the team would have us believe they care about data accuracy, so they would volunteer enmass to staff the reopenned stations, right? Or perhaps as court ordered community work these could be their new homes until they learn the scientific method.

You sure that curve isn’t supposed to be bell shaped? I bet anything that the returns become negative rather quickly after a certain amount of effort is lodged. I mean, misunderstanding the climate system is certainly a negative return, isn’t it?

Mike says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:41 am
Let’s cutoff funding for cancer and AIDS research. I mean what’s the point, we are going to die anyway.
———————————————–
I actually agree. I mean, with the we are going to die anyway mentality. When are we finally going to defeat death itself? Never, of course.
The major difference in this piss poor analogy is the fact that when you are trying to defeat death by curing diseases, these diseases don’t always prey on people that were going to die anyway. Cancer kills children, and so does AIDS. It would be humane to have a cure that would treat the young who are stricken with these diseases. When you try to crush an economy because of a perceived threat from climate change, the economy that funds the disease research Mike is ‘concerned’ with, then you are really just exacerbating the problem. So, Mike, if AGW was found to be an overblown scenario designed to secure nothing more than funding, look at your backhanded sarcasm and ask yourself, who does the money really get taken away from?

Theo Goodwin says:
November 6, 2010 at 6:37 pm
The entire world would be immensely less confused if they understood that there can be no scientific predictions without reasonably well-confirmed hypotheses and statements of initial conditions. So, let us all recite as follows: I will not use the word ‘prediction’ unless I reference the hypothesis and initial conditions that were necessary to make the prediction.
I don’t disagree with you as such, but we were talking about computer models and not a specific hypothesis.
A hypothesis must have predictive qualities as one of the conditions for it’s conformation. You don’t known if all aspects and components of the hypothesis are met until conventional experimentation or field research enhances the hypotheses.
A model can’t tell the researcher if a component or condition has been overlooked or wrongly parameterized.
Computers are fine for complex equations and visual enhancement but they can’t confirm a hypothesis.

LazyTeenager says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:46 pm says….
..” The models already capture most of the physics…”
Dear me why not all of the physics? Is there some physics you wish to leave out and if so why? And incidentally do they also incorporate the complex chemical and biological processes as well?
No doubt you, as an expert in these things, will be able to explain to us unenlightened souls how all this is incorporated into a model.
And further why the laws of thermodynamics, whether realised in terms of entropy or uncertainty somehow do not apply to these models.
And moreover, given your imaginative insight about how the results of these models might be used, can explain to us ignoramuses, just what we ought to do with the results of the model’s output, bearing in mind the limits of their predictive power, which we can demonstrate rather well is zero, quite why or what we should do about it?
Kindest Regards

Everyone talks about computer models as if they are these mysterious black boxes, too complicated to analyze from an outsider’s POV. All numerical computer models are based on two things, and two things only: variables and constants. Variables are what you input. Constants “this number and/or this rate of change is always so” are what the variables work against to give you a result. No matter how large and complex you make the variable arrays, this variables vs. constants crunching is all a model can do. After all, computers can only do one thing; they can compare two numbers. And, they are really bad at subtraction!
Why no one has looked into the inner workings of these models is beyond me. I’d love to look at the constants :).

“”””” LazyTeenager says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I read this and the background material and it did not make sense. It looks distinctly ambiguous and bad expressed or reasoned.
The models already capture most of the physics but still have problems with regional scale climate and decadal scale cycles. Getting the models to deal with cases like this with some skill is going to take a lot of effort. “””””
Well I presume from your assertion that pretty much everything between “Big Bang” cosmology, and “Quantum Chromo-dynamics” is included as “most of the Physics”
I suspect they just dismissed all of “Archeo-Physics” which is all the really interesting stuff that happened in the first 10^-34 seconds after the BB.
I’d be really happy if they only included increments of time down to say one time zone; 15 degrees of Longitude or one hour of time. So that would be 24 different orientations of the planet each day throughout the year. Too much to expect that they would go down to say one degree of earth rotation; or how about one half of one degree; which is the angular diameter of the sun, as seen from earth.
Optical Mouse Navigation algorithms are easily able to do sub pixel interpolation; so these mostly all of the Physics models should be able to follow Mother Gaia’s solar blowtorch continuously as it encircles the globe endlessly.
Funny that you can include nearly all of the physics, and still get the clouds wrong. They would seem to be one of the more obvious parts of the Physics. Well if they can’t even get their weather stations properly located on land; who knows how flaky their models are.
I wonder if they keep track of each of the known possible Isotopic GHGs; such as H2O, HDO, D2O and of course each of those with 16O and 18O, and don’t forget all the different species of CO2 since we know which ones are natural, and therefore good; while the others are man made, and therefore bad.
Since the diffusion rates of molecules are presumably different for different isotopes; the atmospheric energy exchanges, must surely be different for each; different spectral lines and different line broadening effects etc.
And the beautiful thing about computers, is they really don’t car much how many variables you throw into the mix; it is just more simultaneous non-linear partial differential equations to solve.
The good thing about being stuck on a desert island with just a sandy beach and a stick to scratch with, is that you can dispense with a lot of that (Physics) and just concentrate on the important features; like Clouds ALWAYS reduce the total solar energy captured by the earth; and water vapor does too; and more of either of those means less solar energy for earth; pretty simple really, and you don’t have to compute and trend lines or R^2 values either.