From the “it’s worse than we modeled department”, a case of “head in the clouds” thinking:
From the University of Hawaii at Manoa via Eurekalert press release:
Study could mean greater anticipated global warming
Current state-of-the-art global climate models predict substantial warming in response to increases in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The models, though, disagree widely in the magnitude of the warming we can expect.
The disagreement among models is mainly due to the different representation of clouds. Some models predict that global mean cloud cover will increase in a warmer climate and the increased reflection of solar radiation will limit the predicted global warming. Other models predict reduced cloudiness and magnified warming.
In a paper that has just appeared in the Journal of Climate, researchers from the University of Hawaii Manoa (UHM) have assessed the performance of current global models in simulating clouds and have presented a new approach to determining the expected cloud feedbacks in a warmer climate.
Lead author Axel Lauer at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) at UHM notes, “All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate. It is unfortunate that the global models’ greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming.”
To study the clouds, the researchers applied a model representing only a limited region of the atmosphere over the eastern Pacific Ocean and adjacent land areas. The clouds in this region are known to greatly influence present climate, yet current global models do poorly in representing them. The regional model, developed at the IPRC, successfully simulates key features of the region’s present-day cloud fields, including the observed response of clouds to El Nino. Having evaluated the model’s simulation of present-day conditions, the researchers examined the response of simulated clouds in a warmer climate such as it might be in 100 years from now. The tendency for clouds to thin and cloud cover to reduce was more pronounced in this model than in any of the current global models.
NOTE: Believe it or not, but this pathetic little graph is all that was provided with the press release, I have found no larger versions – Anthony
UPDATE: Author Axel Lauer kindly sends me the paper link here
and from that I have a larger version of the graph below:
Co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, “If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see.”
This research was supported by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), by NASA through Grant NNX07AG53G, and by NOAA through Grant NA09OAR4320075, which sponsor research at the International Pacific Research Center. This research was also supported by NOAA/CPPA Grant NA07OAR4310257 and DOE Regional and Global Climate Modeling (RCGM) Program Grant ER64840.
Citation: Lauer, A., K. Hamilton, Y. Wang, V. T. Phillips, and R. Bennartz (2010), The Impact of Global Warming on Marine Boundary Layer Clouds over the Eastern Pacific – A Regional Model Study, Journal of Climate, Vol. 23, No. 21, 5844�.
Researcher Contacts: Axel Lauer (808) 956-3631; email: lauera@hawaii.edu
Kevin Hamilton (808) 956-8327; email: kph@hawaii.edu
IPRC Media Contact: Gisela Speidel, (808) 956-9252; email: gspeidel@hawaii.edu IPRC/SOEST, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1680 East-West Rd., POST Building 401, Honolulu, HI 96822.
The International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa is a climate research center founded to gain greater understanding of the climate system and the nature and causes of climate variation in the Asia-Pacific region and how global climate changes may affect the region. Established under the “U.S.-Japan Common Agenda for Cooperation in Global Perspective” in October 1997, the IPRC is a collaborative effort between agencies in Japan and the United States.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Citizens of year 2010!
My name is Aldous Tenpenny. I speak to you from the year 2082 though I cannot disclose the means by which I do as I am already contravening several Space-Time Tampering(STT)laws.
I am writing to you on behalf of many people of my era with a simple request which I admonish you to heed:
Please continue to make confident forecasts of assured doom, we find them quaint and hilarious.
Kind Regards,
Aldous Tenpenney
Is it me, or does that pathetic lo-res graphic actually indicate that the model shows much greater extremes than observed, indicating that future predictions may overemphasize warming or cooling effects?
First let us postulate a warmer climate. See we told you warming would occur. If I turned in something like that in 10th grade science I would get a “F”.
This is what forecasters publish when THEIR personal an nontransferable end is approaching. It’s over kids!
Here’s the top secret source code to the model:
10 PRINT “GLOBAL WARMING IS CAUSED BY CO2”
20 GOTO 10
Aldous, while you are here could you post the lottery numbers for next week please 😉
Like the joke, if it is one !!!
So let’s see their graph for a future colder climate.
If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands
There are a few out of work tinkers in this article.
I get sick of hearing about models that were made up on a computer.
Don’t these researchers read the peer reviewed literature. How about actual measured data from out in the real environment.
To whit:- “How much More Rain will Global Warming Bring ? ” Frank Wentz et al ; SCIENCE july-7 2007. WENTZ is with RSS in Santa Rosa Ca. as in : giss-hadcrud-RSS-uah.
They had the temerity to actually measure the rate of INCREASE of water in the atmosphere GLOBALLY as a function of mean global surface Temperature rise (or some facsimile thereof). Result; the increase in global precipitation, global atmospheric water content, and global precipitation occurs at the rate of 7% (for each) per deg C rise in Temperature.
I’m told that the 7% per deg C just happens to match what one calculates directly from the Clausius-Clapeyron equation; and I believe one of the regular posters here recently posted that number (Bill Illis maybe ?); so that matches the atmospheric water content observation. The evaporation and precipitation must match overall; or else the oceans will end up overhead.
So this is actual satellite instrument based observations actually out there in Mother Gaia’s laboratory where real things happen.
Wentz et al didn’t specifically talk about clouds; but I conjectured that it is reasonable to expect that a 7% increase in precipitation is likely to be accompanied by a similar increase in (precipitable) clouds. I have no idea what fraction of global cloud cover can be classified as precipitable; but I suppose it is possible that it stays fairly constant as a fraction so maybe total cloud cover goes up by 7%. But that is a bit of a stretch; since the precipitable increase can comprise extra cloud area, or extra cloud optical density due to water content, or extra persistence time of the cloud; or some combination.
I don’t need somebody’s bomb making super computer to tell me that clouds ought to increase with temperature; based on Wentz et al’s paper; which I have not seen refuted in any peer reviewed paper. Can I get some sort of gummint grant to go to Hawaii to explain this to these folks.
According to recent NASA reports; global cloud cover is at about 70% of total area. I think that is higher than most of us had suspected; but assuming that NASA is reasonably competent at seeing clouds; I take it as the truth, until I hear different results.
So if you believe these folks who likely would be better occupied getting out on a surf board; they are saying in effect that natural climate variability may be even greater than was previously believed; so then what is all the fuss about a little bit of temperature cycling; well actually it is only Temperature anomaly cycling; since they don’t really know what the actual global Temperature is.
So, basically, they haven’t got a clue.
It’s funny how journals publish stuff: all alarmist papers were out before Copenhagen and realist papers followed it, probably hoping it would be drowned into Copenhagen’s success…
Now Cancun and the same happens: between this modeling “could” “if” novelty act and the GRL Cattiaux et al. 2010 “last winter was cold but in a warming climate” BS, the official science tries its best at changing a trend.
Oh and it’s really cold out there btw… probably Global Warming.
Hey Anthony
I have something interesting here,
….A1B simulations for each of the 16 GCMs with results that varied from −1.0 to +1.3 W m−2 K−……
-1,0 W* m^-2*K^-1………..(varied)
GCM models also have negative feedback
To investigate cloud–climate feedbacks in iRAM, several global warming scenarios were run with boundary conditions appropriate for late twenty-first-century conditions. All the global warming cases simulated with iRAM show a distinct reduction in low-level cloud amount, particularly in the stratocumulus regime, resulting in positive local feedback parameters in these regions in the range of 4–7 W m−2 K−1. Domain-averaged (30°S–30°N, 150°–60°W) feedback parameters from iRAM range between +1.8 and +1.9 W m−2 K−1. At most locations both the LTS and cloud amount are altered in the global warming cases, but the changes in these variables do not follow the empirical relationship found in the present-day experiments.
The cloud–climate feedback averaged over the same east Pacific region was also calculated from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A1B simulations for each of the 16 GCMs with results that varied from −1.0 to +1.3 W m−2 K−1, all less than the values obtained in the comparable iRAM simulations. The iRAM results by themselves cannot be connected definitively to global climate feedbacks;
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3666.1
Every new paper scarier than the last one published.
Are they convincing anyone? With public confidence waning, I can only guess that they are trying to keep choir from ditching.
I suggest they start with CURRENT cloud formation/behavior and see where that gets them in say, 50, then 100 years. If it doesn’t predict climate conditions much different from those of today, then modeling with SUBJECTIVELY CONFIGURED clouds is an abject waste of time!
Besides, who except the CAGW annointed would ever believe a warmer earth would have LESS clouds! A warmer earth would undoubtedly have more overall evaporation and, consequentially, a more developed cloud cover.
If it’s once again “worse then we expected” how come all the models are already hotter then reality? Don’t they ever stop to think about this?
“Co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, “If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see.”
And if his model does not prove to be representative of the real global climate, then what?
The tiny graph suggests the model consistently predicts more extreme swings than actually occurred (i.e. it over estimates the effect changes in cloud cover).
It also mixes up the causality (i.e. did the 1998 El Nino cause cloud cover to descrease or did decreasing cloud cover cause the 1998 El Nino). I suspect the latter.
“If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate [which they’re not], then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict [which they aren’t], and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see.” [which we won’t]
Airfix would be proud of this lot and their models.
So their little toy model painted fire engine red predicts, projects, guesses, that the variations are much greater than they really are (black ops).
So instead of scrapping their junk model they publish a paper to tout it. Don’t they understand that the model is supposed to replicate reality; not the other way round.
Wentz et al noted the same problem. Their measurements said 7% increase in evap/precip per deg C rise, but the GCMs predict,project, guess only 1% to 3% or (2 +/-50% ) %.
So the GCMs are off by a factor of 3.5 too low (+/-50%) and people still pay attention to such rubbish.
University of Hawaii is fully invested in the AGW hypothesis. They see signs where no one else can. Rising oceans, the acidification of the Pacific, horrendous hurricanes, drought, floods, etc. are all around us. But only the climatologists at the UH can see them. Not even the weather department at the Honolulu International Airport sees these signs. The climatologists must be very smart.
Co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, “If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate,…”
If my granny had wheels, she’d be a wagon. I wouldn’t bet the farm that the model results really are representative of the real global climate. Would Kevin Hamilton care to bet his “farm” on the results?
Please note (my emphasis):
Co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, “If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate…
The cynical amongst could view the word “if” as a “get out of jail free” card. The less cynical could say it signifies an attempt to return to the scientific method.
However, it’s difficult to not be cynical of yet another press release that appears designed to alarm, and with no apparent balancing statements. Science by Hollywood-type media really has started to shoot itself in the foot, repeatedly.
What the #%$@ur momisugly,
so are they saying that ALL the current modls are WRONG, and that all the policies our loopy govt are foisting on us are based on mdels that are WRONG!!
You couldn’t make it up could you. Oh hang on, thats what they have been doing isn’t it?
Co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, “IF our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see.”
Sure, and you could add just as meaningfully:
IF Al Gore is right, sea levels will rise 20 feet;
IF Hansen is right, New York will soon be under water;
IF WWF is right we are about to enter the sixth great extinction.
One could go on, but in the words of that immortal song, “I don’t believe in IF anymore.” No, no.
It is always ‘worse than predicted’, yet reality is never as bad as predicted. I wonder how long they can continue making money off of this obvious unexplained disparity?