UPDATE: see some reactions to this announcement here
From the GWPF
This refers to the CLOUD experiment at CERN.
I’ll have more on this as it develops (updated twice since the original report now), but for the short term, it appears that a non-visible light irradiance effect on Earth’s cloud seeds has been confirmed. The way it is posited to work is that the effect of cosmic rays (modulated by the sun’s magnetic variations which either allow more or deflect more cosmic rays) creates cloud condensation nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. With more condensation nuclei, more clouds form and vice-versa. Clouds have significant effects on TSI at the surface.
Even the IPCC has admitted this in their latest (2007) report:
“Cloud feedbacks are the primary source of inter-model differences in equilibrium climate sensitivity, with low cloud being the largest contributor”.
Update: From the Nature article, Kirkby is a bit more muted in his assessment than the GWPF:
Early results seem to indicate that cosmic rays do cause a change. The high-energy protons seemed to enhance the production of nanometre-sized particles from the gaseous atmosphere by more than a factor of ten. But, Kirkby adds, those particles are far too small to serve as seeds for clouds. “At the moment, it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step,” he says.
Update: Bizarrely, New Scientist headlines with: Cloud-making: Another human effect on the climate
================================================================
CERN Experiment Confirms Cosmic Rays Influence Climate Change.
by Nigel Calder
Long-anticipated results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN in Geneva appear in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature (25 August). The Director General of CERN stirred controversy last month, by saying that the CLOUD team’s report should be politically correct about climate change (see my 17 July post below). The implication was that they should on no account endorse the Danish heresy – Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis that most of the global warming of the 20th Century can be explained by the reduction in cosmic rays due to livelier solar activity, resulting in less low cloud cover and warmer surface temperatures.
Willy-nilly the results speak for themselves, and it’s no wonder the Director General was fretful.
Jasper Kirkby of CERN and his 62 co-authors, from 17 institutes in Europe and the USA, announce big effects of pions from an accelerator, which simulate the cosmic rays and ionize the air in the experimental chamber. The pions strongly promote the formation of clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules – aerosols of the kind that may grow into cloud condensation nuclei on which cloud droplets form. What’s more, there’s a very important clarification of the chemistry involved.
A breach of etiquette
My interest in CLOUD goes back nearly 14 years, to a lecture I gave at CERN about Svensmark’s discovery of the link between cosmic rays and cloudiness. It piqued Kirkby’s curiosity, and both Svensmark and I were among those who helped him to prepare his proposal for CLOUD.
By an unpleasant irony, the only Svensmark contribution acknowledged in theNature report is the 1997 paper (Svensmark and Friis-Christensen) on which I based my CERN lecture. There’s no mention of the successful experiments in ion chemistry and molecular cluster formation by the Danish team in Copenhagen, Boulby and latterly in Aarhus where they beat CLOUD to the first results obtained using a particle beam (instead of gamma rays and natural cosmic rays) to ionize the air in the experimental chamber – see http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/accelerator-results-on-cloud-nucleation-2/
What will historians of science make of this breach of scientific etiquette? That Kirkby was cross because Svensmark, losing patience with the long delay in getting approval and funding for CLOUD, took matters into his own hands? Or because Svensmark’s candour about cosmic rays casting doubt on catastrophic man-made global warming frightened the national funding agencies? Or was Kirkby simply doing his best (despite the results) to obey his Director General by slighting all things Danish?
Personal rivalries aside, the important question is what the new CLOUD paper means for the Svensmark hypothesis. Pick your way through the cautious prose and you’ll find this:
“Ion-induced nucleation [cosmic ray action] will manifest itself as a steady production of new particles [molecular clusters] that is difficult to isolate in atmospheric observations because of other sources of variability but is nevertheless taking place and could be quite large when averaged globally over the troposphere [the lower atmosphere].”
It’s so transparently favourable to what the Danes have said all along that I’m surprised the warmists’ house magazine Nature is able to publish it, even omitting the telltale graph shown at the start of this post. Added to the already favourable Danish experimental findings, the more detailed CERN result is excellent. Thanks a million, Jasper.
Enlightening chemistry
And in friendlier times we’d be sharing champagne for a fine discovery with CLOUD, that traces of ammonia can increase the production of the sulphuric clusters a thousandfold. It’s highlighted in the report’s title: “Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation” and it was made possible by the more elaborate chemical analysis in the big-team set-up in Geneva. In essence, the ammonia helps to stabilize the molecular clusters.
Although not saying it openly, the CLOUD team implies a put-down for the Danes with this result, repeatedly declaring that without ammonia there’d be little cluster production at low altitudes. But although the Aarhus experimenters did indeed assume the simpler reaction (H2SO4 + H2O), differing results in successive experimental runs made them suspect that varying amounts of trace impurities were present in the air cylinders used to fill their chamber. Now it looks as if a key impurity may have been ammonia. But some members of the CLOUD consortium also favoured (H2SO4 + H2O) and early runs in Geneva used no intentional ammonia. So they’ve little reason to scoff.
In any case, whether the basic chemistry is (H2SO4 + H2O) or (H2SO4 + H2O + NH3) is an academic rather than a practical point. There are always traces of ammonia in the real air, and according to the CLOUD report you need only one molecule in 30 billion. If that helps to oil Svensmark’s climatic motor, it’s good to know, but it calls for no apologies and alters the climatic implications not a jot.
The experiment’s logo. The acronym “Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets” always implied strong interest in Svensmark’s hypothesis. And the roles of the Galaxy and the Sun are acknowledged.Technically, CLOUD is a welcome advance on the Danish experiments. Not only is the chemistry wider ranging but molecular clusters as small as 1.7 nanometres in diameter are detectable, compared with 4 nm in Denmark. And the set-up enables the scientists to study the ion chemistry at lower temperatures, corresponding to increasing altitudes in the atmosphere. Cluster production soars as the temperature goes down, until “almost every negative ion gives rise to a new particle” [i.e. molecular cluster]. The lowest temperature reported in the paper is -25 oC. That corresponds to an altitude of 6000 metres, so unless you wish to visualize a rain of cloud-seeding aerosols from on high, it’s not very relevant to Svensmark’s interest in the lowest 3000 metres.
How the warmists built their dam
Shifting from my insider’s perspective on the CLOUD experiment, to see it on the broader canvas of the politicized climate science of the early 21st Century, the chief reaction becomes a weary sigh of relief. Although they never said so, the High Priests of the Inconvenient Truth – in such temples as NASA-GISS, Penn State and the University of East Anglia – always knew that Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis was the principal threat to their sketchy and poorly modelled notions of self-amplifying action of greenhouse gases.
In telling how the obviously large influences of the Sun in previous centuries and millennia could be explained, and in applying the same mechanism to the 20th warming, Svensmark put the alarmist predictions at risk – and with them the billions of dollars flowing from anxious governments into the global warming enterprise.
For the dam that was meant to ward off a growing stream of discoveries coming from the spring in Copenhagen, the foundation was laid on the day after the Danes first announced the link between cosmic rays and clouds at a space conference in Birmingham, England, in 1996. “Scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible,”Bert Bolin declared, as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
As several journalists misbehaved by reporting the story from Birmingham, the top priority was to tame the media. The first courses of masonry ensured that anything that Svensmark and his colleagues might say would be ignored or, failing that, be promptly rubbished by a warmist scientist. Posh papers like The Times of London and the New York Times, and posh TV channels like the BBC’s, readily fell into line. Enthusiastically warmist magazines like New Scientist and Scientific Americanneeded no coaching.
Similarly the journals Nature and Science, which in my youth prided themselves on reports that challenged prevailing paradigms, gladly provided cement for higher masonry, to hold the wicked hypothesis in check at the scientific level. Starve Svensmark of funding. Reject his scientific papers but give free rein to anyone who criticizes him. Trivialize the findings in the Holy Writ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. None of this is paranoia on my part, but a matter of close personal observation since 1996.
“It’s the Sun, stupid!” The story isn’t really about a bunch of naughty Danish physicists. They are just spokesmen for the most luminous agent of climate change. As the Sun was what the warmists really wanted to tame with their dam, they couldn’t do it. And coming to the Danes’ aid, by briefly blasting away many cosmic rays with great puffs of gas, the Sun enabled the team to trace in detail the consequent reduction in cloud seeding and liquid water in clouds. See my posthttp://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/do-clouds-disappear/ By the way, that research also disposes of a morsel of doubt in the new CLOUD paper, about whether the small specks made by cosmic rays really grow sufficiently to seed cloud droplets.
As knowledge accumulated behind their dam and threatened to overtop it, the warmists had one last course to lay. Paradoxically it was CLOUD. Long delays with this experiment to explore the microchemical mechanism of the Svensmark effect became the chief excuse for deferring any re-evaluation of the Sun’s role in climate change. When the microchemical mechanism was revealed prematurely by the SKY experiment in Copenhagen and published in 2006, the warmists said, “No particle accelerator? That won’t do! Wait for CLOUD.” When the experiment in Aarhus confirmed the mechanism using a particle accelerator they said, “Oh that’s just the Danes again! Wait for CLOUD.”
Well they’ve waited and their dam has failed them.
Hall of Shame
Retracing those 14 years, what if physics had functioned as it is supposed to do? What if CLOUD, quickly approved and funded, had verified the Svensmark effect with all the authority of CERN, in the early 2000s. What if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had done a responsible job, acknowledging the role of the Sun and curtailing the prophecies of catastrophic warming?
For a start there would have no surprise about the “travesty” that global warming has stopped since the mid-1990s, with the Sun becoming sulky. Vast sums might have been saved on misdirected research and technology, and on climate change fests and wheezes of every kind. The world’s poor and their fragile living environment could have had far more useful help than precautions against warming.
And there would have been less time for so many eminent folk from science, politics, industry, finance, the media and the arts to be taken in by man-made climate catastrophe. (In London, for example, from the Royal Society to the National Theatre.) Sadly for them, in the past ten years they’ve crowded with their warmist badges into a Hall of Shame, like bankers before the crash.
As I reported on May 14th, 2011 in Update on the CERN CLOUD experiment:
From Physics World Head in a CLOUD:
In this special video report for physicsworld.com CLOUD project leader Jasper Kirkby explains what his team is trying to achieve with its experiment. “We’re trying to understand what the connection is between a cosmic ray going through the atmosphere and the creation of so-called aerosol seeds – the seed for a cloud droplet or an ice particle,” Kirkby explains.
The CLOUD experiment recreates these cloud-forming processes by directing the beamline at CERN’s proton synchrotron into a stainless-steel chamber containing very pure air and selected trace gases.
One of the aims of the experiment is to discover details of cloud formation that could feed back into climate models. “Everybody agrees that clouds have a huge effect on the climate. But the understanding of how big that effect is is really very poorly known,” says Kirkby.
Here’s the video, click image below to launch it.
=====================================================
More coverage: Big hat tip to WUWT reader “Andrew20”
Cosmic rays get ahead in CLOUD
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2011/August/24081102.asp
Cloud formation may be linked to cosmic rays
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.504.html
Cloud formation study casts a shadow over certain climate models
======================================================
Update: From Nigel Calder’s blog
A graph they’d prefer you not to notice. Tucked away near the end of online supplementary material, and omitted from the printed CLOUD paper in Nature, it clearly shows how cosmic rays promote the formation of clusters of molecules (“particles”) that in the real atmosphere can grow and seed clouds. In an early-morning experimental run at CERN, starting at 03.45, ultraviolet light began making sulphuric acid molecules in the chamber, while a strong electric field cleansed the air of ions. It also tended to remove molecular clusters made in the neutral environment (n) but some of these accumulated at a low rate. As soon as the electric field was switched off at 04.33, natural cosmic rays (gcr) raining down through the roof of the experimental hall in Geneva helped to build clusters at a higher rate. How do we know they were contributing? Because when, at 04.58, CLOUD simulated stronger cosmic rays with a beam of charged pion particles (ch) from the accelerator, the rate of cluster production became faster still. The various colours are for clusters of different diameters (in nanometres) as recorded by various instruments. The largest (black) took longer to grow than the smallest (blue). This is Fig. S2c from supplementary online material for J. Kirkby et al., Nature, 476, 429-433, © Nature 2011
CERN’s chief investigator for CLOUD, Dr. Jasper Kirkby, says that emissions from trees will be the next candidate to be examined. Could trees possibly create some larger stuff that may seed clouds better when struck by cosmic rays, and thereby bring on future global cooling due to the plethora of contra-CO2 trees now being planted? I wonder — can CLOUD potentially implicate tree sap? Will IPCC’s true believers then go back to Yamal for some more selected tree cores to support some new sappy studies? (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist … )
Leif Svalgaard,
“Your and meany other’s mistake is to believe that models in principle are useless.”
I’m sure people aren’t saying that about models in general. One example of a successful computer model outcome came from cosmology, and it was designed to test the conjecture that dark matter is necessary for galaxy formation. They first constructed a model to simulate a galactic formation that contained only ordinary matter. The result showed that instead of the myriad of long lived stars we observe, we end up with matter condensing into a relatively small number of giant stars that blow themselves up after a few million years. So the model falsified the null hypothesis that galaxies can be formed by ordinary matter alone. They then added a ‘skeleton’ of dark matter to see if this led to observed reality, and it did – the galaxy that resulted was much like our own.
I like this example very much, because it is based on known physics (gravitational attraction and laws of motion) and sets out to test a hypothesis.
However, all models are not built equal. Theo Godwin and others have pretty much summed up the problem. First, they don’t know the physical laws – Kirkby’s results have proved that. Second, the models aren’t testing any known conjecture or hypothesis – quite the opposite. They are generating predictions, but these predictions tell us nothing about the underlying science.
Cuthbert says:
August 24, 2011 at 11:37 am
” … and even Kirby says “At the moment, it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step,”
However, Kirby says:
“Numerous palaeoclimatic reconstructions suggest that solar/GCR variability has an important influence on climate
Inactive sun (low sunspot peak, long cycle length) – cold climate
Active sun (high sunspot peak, short cycle length) – warm climate
high GCR flux cool climate
low GCR flux warm climate
Correlation recently reported between solar/GCR variability and temperature in Siberia from glacial ice core
Climate has continually varied in the past, and the causes are not well understood – especially on the 100 year timescale relevant for today’s climate change
Strong evidence for solar-climate variability, but no established mechanism. A cosmic ray influence on clouds is a leading candidate.”
GCR is a label. What is solar variability? What are ‘cosmic rays’? I don’t know.
Seems that the object ‘cosmic rays’ have to expressed in common scientific units and to explained where the source of the particles is located.
The sun is not the cosmos.
V.
Doug Badgero says:
August 26, 2011 at 10:00 am
Volker,
You don’t understand what deterministic chaos is………..it is not “chance”.
I listen to people who speak about that what IS.
EOD
Volker
Theo Goodwin says:
August 26, 2011 at 10:32 am
then use the terms of scientific method when you respond to my claims about it.
I don’t know what ‘the terms of scientific method’ are. Explain.
I gave you an example of the scientific method in action. You have no comments on that?
Frank K. says:
August 26, 2011 at 10:36 am
That’s why I challenge the modelers to write down ALL of the relevant equations that their codes are using, including the numerical approximations (GISS still hasn’t done this for Model E).
As far as I know, the code is published for all to see.
stephen richards says:
August 26, 2011 at 7:21 am
Gates
Milankovitch astronomical forcing
Forget it gates, Milancovic cycles are not a forcing. This is team talk to make it seem like everything forces the weather/climate. Force is a unit of work. MC does no[t] work.
_____
You don’t believe that Milankovitch cycles act as an external forcing on the climate?
How interesting.
Don’t know what “team talk” you’re referring to, nor who might suggest that “everything” forces the weather or climate, but clearly changes in the amount of NH insolation brought about by Milankovitch cycles do affect the climate, though, as the point of this really is about the fact that the net forcing is far in excess of that which should be brought about by the change in NH summer insolation alone…hence, the notion of positive feedback effects from the increases in CO2 which Milankovitch cycles initiate.
We need an independent assessment group crawling all over the Team’s climate model code and its parameterisations and ad hoc bolt-ons.
R. Gates says:
August 26, 2011 at 12:05 pm
R Gates, why have you altered the meaning of stephen richards comment by changing “no work” into “no[t] work”?
{Nope, my – evidently incorrect! – edit to correct an apparent typo in the original. Hence, the []’s My error, Robt]
R. Gates:
I write to thank you for the laugh you gave me at August 26, 2011 at 6:53 am .
Your post demonstrates that you know nothing – absolutely nothing – about radiative forcing but you have sufficient of both arrogance and stupidity to pontificate about that of which you are blissfully ignorant.
At August 26, 2011 at 3:22 am I wrote the completely accurate statements that said;
”R. Gates:
You are asserting that “radiative forcing” directly affects “warming”.
Phil Jourdan points out that it does not.”
Your post replies by saying:
“This is nonsense of the highest order. Of course radiative forcing directly affects warming, and we all should be glad it does to a point. No radiative forcing, no nice greenhouse effect…very cold planet.”
You write that rubbish and have the gall to call my accurate statement “nonsense”!
Laugh? I almost wet myself.
The Sun has increased its direct radiative forcing of the Earth by between 20% and 30% since the Earth has obtained an oxygen-rich atmosphere. And there has been liquid water on the surface of the Earth throughout that time.
If radiative forcing directly affects warming then the oceans would have boiled to steam long ago.
The climate system is bi-stable. It has had similar temperatures in glacial and interglacial periods despite very different amounts of radiative forcing. And that is why the Earth has sustained life forms to the present day.
Richard
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 26, 2011 at 7:13 am
anna v says:
August 26, 2011 at 12:55 am
For too long mediocre prophets have been using model outputs to push their political agendas.
“Where is the mediocrity and dishonesty you are postulating in this:http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011GL048438.pdf ”
The reference is a 20 day ( weather) program and 7 month exercise. Climate is over 30 years.
Since we are talking of clouds, here is a study By D.Koutsoyannis et al, of the predictions from current GCM for climate, on hydrological conditions of the planet.
From their conclusion:
It is claimed that GCMs provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above. Examining the local performance of the models at 55 points, we found that local projections do not correlate well with observed measurements. Furthermore, we found that the correlation at a large spatial scale, i.e. the contiguous USA, is worse than at the local scale.
The intellectual dishonesty in your link comes from using the model validated on 20 days for climate projections because “how could such expensive computer outputs be wrong?”
Friends:
There is much talk here about the climate models.
Please remember that the output of a computer model is evidence of what the modellers programmed. It is not evidence of anything else.
Each climate model is unique. They each use a different value of ‘climate sensitivity’ and each is tuned (sorry, “parametrised”) to match past increase to global temperature by a unique value of assumed ‘aerosol forcing’.
But there is only one climate system of the Earth. Therefore, at most only one of the models emulates the Earth’s climate system. If one of them is right then there is no way to discern which one that is. And taking an average of their indications compounds this problem because average wrong is wrong.
So, most – probably all – of the climate models are emulating something other than the Earth’s climate. Hence, the output of a climate model is an indication of what the Earth’s climate probably will NOT do.
And clouds are the biggest flaw in the models’ designs.
Ron Miller and Gavin Schmidt, both of NASA GISS, provide an evaluation of the leading US GCM. They are U.S. climate modelers who use the NASA GISS GCM and they strongly promote the AGW hypothesis. Their paper tiltled ‘Ocean & Climate Modeling: Evaluating the NASA GISS GCM’ was updated on 2005-01-10 and is available at
http://icp.giss.nasa.gov/research/ppa/2001/oceans/
Its abstract says this:
“This preliminary investigation evaluated the performance of three versions of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies’ recently updated General Circulation Model E (GCM).
[snip]
The model had problems representing variables in geographic areas of sea ice, thick vegetation, low clouds and high relief. It was hypothesized that these problems arose from the way the model calculates the effects of vegetation, sea ice and cloud cover.
[snip]”
This problem of erroneous representation of low level clouds could be expected to induce the model to provide incorrect indication of effects of changes to atmospheric GHGs because changes to clouds have much greater effect on climate than changes to GHGs.
Climate models? They are computer games for the amusement of those who lack sufficient skill to play on a PS2.
Richard
Scottish Sceptic says:
August 26, 2011 at 12:03 am
And in my next post I shall attempt something easier … like explaining the rules of Cricket……
—————————–
OK then Mr Sottsman. If you are that bright then explain how the English could have invented a game that can play for up to 5 days and still not have a winner?
Richard S Courtney says:
August 26, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Right on the money. Today the public lives in a computer model bubble. That bubble will burst soon. For those who are engaged in the climate science debates, the bubble burst long ago.
izen says:
“Why would any scientists who grasps the AGW theory…”
AGW is not a theory.
Leif Svalgaard says:
…………….
Dr. S
One day we should exchange views on the occasional concord between your solar HMF and my (nothing to do with solar) NAP data.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/S-V.htm
Vince Causey says:
August 26, 2011 at 11:13 am
Extremely well said. I really like your example from cosmology. It is a perfect example of highly successful use of a model to perform analysis within the context of physical law. Models are fabulous analytic tools. They have no synthetic capability whatsoever; that is, they are worthless for prediction.
@izen
Thanks for your reply. But muons / pions are just as neutral as neutrons. It seems clear that the component of GCR that will cause the interactions leading to cloud nucleation will be charged particles, such as fast protons.
Thus I continue to fail to see the significance of data on neutrons and pions / muons on the Svensmark type mechanism. Perhaps they are a convenient index of GCR because they are not charged and thus reach the earth surface without interacting. However only charged particles will have the stopping power and LET to cause interactions including ionisation leading to nucleation.
WHAT IF a significant – or predominant – part of the particles causing cloud nucleation were not primary but secondary particles? High atmosphere collisions and spallation between incoming GCR particles of any type, including neutrons, yields a rain of secondary charged particles (in medical physics these are called delta particles). These secondary charged particles are (a) sensitive to shielding of earth by charged particle solar wind and magnetic fields (unlike neutrons and other neutral particles) and (b) the most potent to cause interactions leading to nucleation, on account of their charge.
Thus surface measured fluxes of non-charged particles could be irrelevant to the Svensmark mechanism if it is charged particles, including secondary ones, that are “doing the business”.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 26, 2011 at 11:44 am
Theo Goodwin says:
August 26, 2011 at 10:32 am
then use the terms of scientific method when you respond to my claims about it.
“I don’t know what ‘the terms of scientific method’ are. Explain.
I gave you an example of the scientific method in action. You have no comments on that?”
The basic terminology of scientific method:
1. Physical hypothesis: a universally quantified general statement which is conditional in form, though it can contain many sub-clauses that are conditionals, and describes some regularity in nature. My favorite examples are Kepler’s Three Laws. Law one states that planetary orbits are ellipses with the sun at one foci. All physical hypotheses must be relatively well-confirmed. See Kuhn’s “Copernican Revolution” on the confirmation of Kepler’s hypotheses and Newton’s rigorous formulation of those hypotheses.
2. Initial conditions: these are statements of observable fact which can be combined with one or more reasonably well-confirmed physical hypotheses to form an argument that implies some statements of observable fact that describe events that will occur in the future (prediction) or the past (postdiction or retrodiction).
3. Predictions: statements of observable fact that have been deduced from at least one relatively well-confirmed physical hypothesis and some set of initial conditions.
4. Confirmation: the event of discovering that a prediction correctly describes observable fact and, for that reason, has been found to be true. The hypothesis or hypotheses used in the prediction are what is confirmed.
5. Scientific explanation: a set of relatively well-confirmed physical hypotheses and a set of initial conditions that are used to predict some event. The event predicted is the event explained. For example, from Kepler’s Three Laws one can explain that Venus will be in half-phase (like a half moon) at time t for observer o on the surface of Earth. The explanation is the set of hypotheses that specify all the facts our solar system as they are presented in the standard encyclopedia of science. The predicted event is said to be an “instance” of the natural regularities that make up the solar system. Notice that prediction and explanation are fully symmetric. What is predicted is explained by the physical hypotheses and initial conditions used for the prediction and what is explained is what is predicted.
For a more complete account, buy one of the two classics:
Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation.
Israel Scheffler, The Anatomy of Inquiry
For more recent but more challenging accounts:
Isaac Levi, The Enterprise of Knowledge (and his later works).
Kirkby follows the scientific method religiously. He designed his experiment in a controlled environment so that he could investigate the interactions among water vapor, sulphuric acid, ammonia, cosmic rays, and nothing else. To his surprise, he learned that those four ingredients are not sufficient to create low flying clouds in Earth’s atmosphere. Now he is searching for another ingredient.
Kirkby’s work proves that climate models are incorrectly formulated because they assume that the four ingredients are sufficient for generating the low flying clouds in question. Climate modelers could not have discovered this information on their own. They could not have made the discovery because they assume that their models truly represent the natural environment so long as each simulation contains a set of numbers that is consistent with, but maybe divergent from, the usual set of numbers that are observed in Earth’s environment. There is no way that a modeler can evaluate that assumption. The only way to evaluate that assumption is to do what Kirkby did, namely, step outside the model and follow the scientific method by creating an environment that permits empirical testing of the basic assumptions about what is necessary for cloud formation.
Modelers are not empirical scientists and, for that reason, are also not physical scientists. They desperately need the Kirkby’s of the world to anchor them in empirical reality. Modelers are Begging the Question; that is, they Argue in a Circle. They assume that if the results of a model run are consistent with observed reality then “the model” or “that component of the model” has explained and predicted the observed numbers. False. False. False. You have to do what Kirkby did before you know whether your “model” or “component of a model” is actually useful for explanation and prediction of the behavior of low-flying clouds. Kirkby just proved that no existing model can explain or predict the behavior of low-flying clouds. That is a classic application of scientific method.
tallbloke says:
August 26, 2011 at 12:31 pm
“We need an independent assessment group crawling all over the Team’s climate model code and its parameterisations and ad hoc bolt-ons.”
Absolutely. You need high-end programmers who are well-versed in advanced heuristics. They must also have a keen understanding of science and scientific method. Their first assessment would show that computer models offer no reason to believe that AGW is taking place now or has taken place in the last 150 years.
Smokey says:
August 26, 2011 at 1:53 pm
AGW is not a theory.
____
OMG! Really? Then what is all the fuss about?
anna v says:
August 26, 2011 at 12:51 pm
The intellectual dishonesty in your link comes from using the model validated on 20 days for climate projections because “how could such expensive computer outputs be wrong?”
I don’t know anybody who actually thinks so [with the exception of some commenters here]. That the models are no good is not because the modellers are morons or dishonest, but because the job is difficult. Steady progress might get us there. All the talk about ‘the models do what the programmers put in there without knowing what they are doing’ is just nonsense. That people make policy based on faith in the models is their fault, not the modelers. A people have the politicians they deserve.
Theo Goodwin says:
August 26, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Models are fabulous analytic tools. They have no synthetic capability whatsoever; that is, they are worthless for prediction.
Yet, models are used everyday for just that.
“With ever increasing computer power, the boxes become smaller and smaller and the results better and better. Your and meany other’s mistake is to believe that models in principle are useless.”
As Reagan said, “There you go again”. I for one never said that models are useless. I have said that they are not sufficiently rigourous to base any policy decisions on.
I have stated that the hindcasts do not adequately correspond to historical data to call them validated.
I have repeatedly declared that the models cannot be used to show that CO2 is the primary cause of the warming seen over the last 100 years. I have also said that because of their lack of rigor, the claims made by modelers that doubling CO2 will result in a temperature increase of 5 to 10C is not credible.
As to your comments about reducing the size of the boxes. Every time you have the size of the boxes, the amount of computing power needed goes up by the cube. Make the boxes half the size, your computer needs to be 8 times more powerfull. Make the boxes 1/4th, computer power required goes up by 64 times.
Gates says:
“OMG! Really? Then what is all the fuss about?”
Yes, really. AGW is an evidence-free hypothesis that cannot make accurate, testable predictions. A theory has at least one nontrivial validating datum. AGW has none.
And all the ‘fuss’ is based on a grant-driven scare over a harmless and beneficial trace gas. Take away the money, and the AGW alarmism goes away.
Theo Goodwin says:
August 25, 2011 at 8:18 pm
you have no understanding of scientific method whatsoever.
I gave you an example of the scientific method in action. You have no comments on that?
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL048616.shtml with article here
http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual-Comment.pdf
Theo Goodwin says:
August 26, 2011 at 2:34 pm
The basic terminology of scientific method
You have demonstrated that you can cut and paste, but have not shown that you understand or have any experience with what you pasted. How often do you apply the ‘scientific method’?
Kirkby follows the scientific method religiously. He designed his experiment in a controlled environment so that he could investigate the interactions among water vapor, sulphuric acid, ammonia, cosmic rays, and nothing else. To his surprise, he learned that those four ingredients are not sufficient to create low flying clouds in Earth’s atmosphere.
So, following the scientific method, he has now disproved the hypothesis, as you admit: “4. Confirmation: the event of discovering that a prediction correctly describes observable fact and, for that reason, has been found to be true” which in his case he did not find, thus disproving the hypothesis.
Theo Goodwin says:
August 26, 2011 at 2:39 pm
Their first assessment would show that computer models offer no reason to believe that AGW is taking place now or has taken place in the last 150 years.
You prescribe what they are supposed to find [just like the IPCC] or describe what you wish them to find. You call that the ‘scientific method’?
@ur momisugly Leif Svalgaard says: August 26, 2011 at 6:37 am
Leif, dividing your chart that I already looked at into two parts doesn’t address my question/point.