Guest post by Bob Tisdale
OVERVIEW
This post compares the instrument observations of three global temperature anomaly datasets (NINO3, Global, and North Atlantic “Plus”) to the hindcasts of the NCAR couple climate model CCSM4, which was used in a couple of recent peer-reviewed climate studies. Those studies relied solely on the models and do not present time-series graphs that compare observational data to the 20thCentury hindcasts to allow readers to determine if the NCAR CCSM4 model has any basis in reality. So far, I have not seen this done in any of the blog posts that have discussed those studies.
(And for those wondering, NCAR is the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the CCSM4stands for Community Climate System Model Version 4. CCSM4 is a coupled climate model.)
This post would have been much easier to prepare if the Sea Surface Temperature outputs of the NCAR CCSM4 were available through the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) Climate Explorer website. Then I would not have felt obligated to provide as many introductory explanations and graphs, and supplemental comparisons. (The post would have been easier to write, and easier to read.) But since the modeled Sea Surface Temperature data are not available yet, I’ll present, for the time being, the NCAR CCSM4 hindcast surface air temperature anomalies. As noted a number of times throughout this post, if and when the Sea Surface Temperature hindcasts are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer, I will be more than happy to update this post.
Note 1: The period used in this post runs from January 1900 to December 2005 because the NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature anomalies, used in one of the studies, have little to no source data before 1900, and the CCSM4 model hindcast ends in 2005.
Note 2: The source of data for this post, as noted above, is the KNMI Climate Explorer. Surface Air Temperature is available for the NCAR CCSM4 on their Monthly CMIP5 scenario runs webpage, but Sea Surface Temperature (identified as TOS) is not. Therefore, this post compares the Surface Air Temperatures anomalies (which over the oceans would be comparable to Marine Air Temperature anomalies) of the model outputs to Sea Surface temperature anomalies during the discussion of ENSO. And as you will see, this should not present any problems for this discussion. For the model-to-data comparisons of global and of North Atlantic “Plus” surface temperature anomalies, observed land plus sea surface temperature anomalies are compared to the modeled Surface Air Temperature anomalies for land and oceans. This is common practice in posts that compare instrument observations to model outputs at blogs such as Real Climate (Example post: 2010 updates to model-data comparisons) and Lucia’s The Blackboard, (Example post: GISTemp: Up during August!), and it assumes the modeled sea surface temperatures will be roughly the same as the modeled Marine Air Temperatures. (More on this at the end of the post.)
Note 3: This post does not examine the projections of future climate presented in the referenced papers. This post examines how well or poorly the CCSM4 ensemble members and model mean match the observations that are part of the instrument temperature record. You, the reader, will then have to decide whether the model-based studies that use the CCSM4 are of value or whether they should be dismissed as mainframe computer-crunched conjecture.
INTRODUCTION
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate System Model Version 4 (CCSM4) coupled climate model has been submitted to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5)archive of coupled climate model simulations. (Phew, try saying that fast, three times.) And much of the data provided to CMIP5 for those models are presently available through the KNMI Climate Explorer Monthly CMIP5 scenario runs webpage. The model data stored in the CMIP5 archive will serve as a source for the next IPCC report, AR5, due in 2013. Refer to the Real Climate post CMIP5 simulationsfor further information.
Two papers based on the NCAR CCSM4 climate model have recently been published. There may be other published papers as well based on the CCSM4. The first is Meehl et al (2011) “Model-based evidence of deep-ocean heat uptake during surface-temperature hiatus periods”, paywalled. Meehl et al (2011) is a model-based study that attempts to illustrate that ocean heat uptake can continue during decadal periods when global surface temperatures flatten. The La Niña portion of the natural climate phenomenon called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was determined to be the possible cause for the flattening of surface temperatures and for the increase in Ocean Heat uptake. Yup, La Niña events. For me, the paper raised a number of questions. One of them was: Why did Meehl et al (2011) only discuss decadal hiatus periods, during which surface temperatures failed to rise? The instrument temperature record for 20thCentury clearly shows a multidecadal decline in surface temperatures from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s that is attributable, in part, to a mode of natural variability called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Doesn’t the NCAR CCSM4 simulate multidecadal variability?
(For an introductory discussion of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, refer to the post An Introduction To ENSO, AMO, and PDO — Part 2.)
The second paper is Stevenson et al (2011) “Will there be a significant change to El Niño in the 21st century?”, also paywalled, but a Preprint exists for it. Stevenson et al (2011) is also a model-based study that attempts to illustrate, from the abstract:
“ENSO variability weakens slightly with CO2; however, various significance tests reveal that changes are insignificant at all but the highest CO2 levels.”
In other words, there is little change in the model depiction of the strength and frequency of El Niño and La Niña events with increasing levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The Stevenson et al (2011) abstract concludes with:
“An examination of atmospheric teleconnections, in contrast, shows that the remote influences of ENSO do respond rapidly to climate change in some regions, particularly during boreal winter. This suggests that changes to ENSO impacts may take place well before changes to oceanic tropical variability itself becomes significant.”
The NCAR “Staff Notes” webpage “El Niño and climate change in the coming century” provides this further explanation:
“However, the warmer and moister atmosphere of the future could make ENSO events more extreme. For example, the model predicts the blocking high pressure south of Alaska that often occurs during La Niña winters to strengthen under future atmospheric conditions, meaning that intrusions of Arctic air into North America typical of La Niña winters could be stronger in the future.”
I suspect we’ll be reading something to the effect of “oh, the cold temperatures were predicted by climate models”, referring to Stevenson et al (2011), if the coming 2011/12 La Niña winter is colder than normal in North America.
Since the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a major part of both papers, let’s start with it. For those new to ENSO, refer to the post “An Introduction To ENSO, AMO, and PDO – Part 1”for further information.
HOW WELL DOES CCSM4 HINDCAST CERTAIN ASPECTS OF ENSO?
Stevenson et al (2011) used NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Anomalies as their primary El Niño-Southern Oscillation index. NINO3 is a region in the eastern equatorial Pacific with the coordinates of 5S-5N, 150W-90W. Its sea surface temperature anomalies are used as one of the indices that indicate the frequency and magnitude of El Niño and La Niña events. Unfortunately, the CCSM4 modeled Sea Surface Temperature data are not available for download through the KNMI Climate Explorer as of this writing. That requires us to use the model’s Surface Air Temperature output in the comparisons. The second problem is that the comparable instrument observations dataset, Marine Air Temperature, for the NINO3 region becomes nonexistent before 1950, as shown in Figure 1, and we’d like the comparison to start earlier than 1950.
Figure 1
The other option is to compare Sea Surface Temperature observations for the NINO3 region to the Surface Air Temperature outputs of the model. This should be acceptable in the equatorial Pacific since there is little difference between the observed NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature anomaly and Marine Air Temperature anomaly data. Figure 2 compares observed Sea Surface Temperature anomalies and Marine Air Temperature anomalies from January 1950 to December 2005. As illustrated, there are differences in the magnitude of the year-to-year variability between the two datasets. The Sea Surface Temperature anomalies vary slightly more than the Marine Air Temperature anomalies. But the timing of the variations are similar, as one would expect. The correlation coefficient for the two datasets is 0.92. Also note that the linear trends for the two datasets are basically identical. As mentioned earlier, the comparison of NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly observations to the Surface Air Temperature hindcasts for the same region should be reasonable—at least for the purpose of this introductory post.
Figure 2
As I’ve illustrated in numerous earlier posts here, the long-term trend, since 1900, of the more commonly used NINO3.4 Sea Surface Temperature anomalies is basically flat. The same holds true for NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature anomalies, as shown in Figure 3. Based on the linear trend, there has been no rise in the Sea Surface Temperature anomalies for the NINO3 region since 1900. El Niño events dominated from 1900 through the early 1940s, La Niña events prevailed from the early 1940s to the mid 1970s, and then from 1976 to 2005, El Niño events were dominant. In other words, there is a multidecadal component to the frequency and magnitude of El Niño and La Niña events. That’s the reason a trend appears in the data that starts in 1950, Figure 2; the shorter-term data begins during a period when La Niña events dominated and moves into an epoch when El Niño events dominated.
Figure 3
So how well do the ensemble members and ensemble mean of the CCSM4 hindcasts of NINO3 Surface Air Temperatures compare to the NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature observations? Refer to Animation 1. Each of the six ensemble members and the ensemble mean are illustrated by individual graphs. The ensemble member graphs change every three seconds, while the ensemble mean remains in place for six seconds. (This also holds true for Animations 2 and 3.)
Animation 1
The first thing that’s obviously different is that the frequency and magnitude of El Niño and La Niña events of the individual ensemble members do not come close to matching those observed in the instrument temperature record. Should they? Yes. During a given time period, it is the frequency and magnitude of ENSO events that determines how often and how much heat is released by the tropical Pacific into the atmosphere during El Niño events, how much Downward Shortwave Radiation (visible sunlight) is made available to warm “and recharge” the tropical Pacific during La Niña events, and how much heat is transported poleward in the atmosphere and oceans, some of it for secondary release from the oceans during some La Niña events. If the models do not provide a reasonable facsimile of the strength and frequency of El Niño and La Niña events during given epochs, the modelers have no means of reproducing the true causes of the multiyear/multidecade rises and falls of the surface temperature anomalies. The frequency and magnitude of El Niño and La Niña events contribute to the long-term rises and falls in global surface temperature.
Of even greater concern are the NINO3 Surface Air Temperature linear trends exhibited by the CCSM4 model ensemble members and model mean. As discussed earlier, there has been no rise in eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies from 1900 to present, yet the CCSM4 ensemble members and mean show linear trends that are so high they exceed the rise in measured global surface temperature anomalies. In the real world, cool waters from below the surface of the eastern equatorial Pacific upwell at all times except during El Niño events. It is that feed of cool subsurface water that helps to maintain the relatively flat linear trend there.
The trend in the NCAR CCSM4 NINO3 Surface Air Temperature anomaly hindcast is consistent with their hindcast of NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature anomalies from their previous version of the CCSM coupled climate models, which was the CCSM3. Figure 4 compares observed NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature anomalies to the hindcast of the CCSM3. (There is only one CCSM3 model run of Sea Surface Temperatures available through the KNMI Climate Explorer.) While the trend of the CCSM3 hindcast of NINO3 Sea Surface Temperature anomalies may not be as high as the trend of the CCSM4 hindcast of NINO3 Surface Air Temperatures, they are still showing a significant trend.
Figure 4
And to contradict this, the NCAR website presents NINO3.4 SST anomalies (They do not provide NINO3) with a flat trend over this period. Refer to Figure 5. So it appears as though NCAR understands that eastern equatorial Sea Surface Temperatures have not risen since 1900, based on the linear trend. Yet for some reason, their CCSM4 couple climate model cannot recreate this. (The data for Figure 5 is available at the NCAR webpage here. The dataset was prepared for the Trenberth and Stepaniak (2001) paper “Indices of El Niño evolution.”)
Figure 5
To answer the question that heads this section, the CCSM4 coupled climate model does a poor job hindcasting two important aspects of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.
(For those new to my posts on ENSO, refer to ENSO Indices Do Not Represent The Process Of ENSO Or Its Impact On Global Temperature.It is written at an introductory level and discusses and illustrates with graphs and animations how and why El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for much of the rise in Global Sea Surface Temperatures over the past 30 years, the era of satellite-based Sea Surface Temperature data.)
HOW WELL DOES CCSM4 HINDCAST GLOBAL SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES?
Meehl et al (2011) used HADCRUT Global Surface Temperature anomaly data in their Supplementary Information, so we’ll compare the HADCRUT Land plus Sea Surface Temperature anomaly dataset to the Ensemble Members and Mean for the Surface Air Temperatures of the NCAR CCSM4 on a Global basis. Refer to Animation 2. (It’s formatted the same as Animation 1: Observations Versus Six Ensemble Members and Model Mean.) The most obvious differences between the observations and the model outputs are the trends. The modeled trends are about 50% higher than those observed from 1900 to 2005. That’s a major difference. The other obvious difference is the CCSM4 ensemble members and mean do not appear to have the multidecadal component that is so apparent in the Global Surface Temperature anomaly records. Observed Global Surface Temperatures rose from the 1910s to the 1940s, dropped slightly from the 1940s to the 1970s, and then rose again from the 1970s to the late 1990s/early 2000s. The model outputs rise in the latter part of the 20th century, but fail to rise at a rate comparable to the observations during the early part of the 20thCentury and fail to drop from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Animation 2
And to answer the question that heads this section, the CCSM4 coupled climate model does a poor job hindcasting two important and obvious aspects of the Global Surface Temperature anomaly record from 1900 to 2005.
One of the known contributors to the multidecadal variations in Global Surface Temperature anomaly record is the mode of natural variability called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO. One might suspect that the AMO does not exist in the CCSM4. Let’s check.
HOW WELL DOES CCSM4 HINDCAST THE ADDITIONAL VARIABILITY IN NORTH ATLANTIC SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES?
Note that this is another portion of this post I will redo if and when the CCSM4 Sea Surface Temperature outputs are made available through the KNMI Climate Explorer. Also note that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is typically represented by detrended North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature anomalies. But the multidecadal variations are easily visible in the “un-detrended” data, so I have not bothered to detrend it in the following graphs.
As discussed earlier, the Sea Surface Temperature outputs of the NCAR CCSM4 are not yet available through the KNMI Climate Explorer. But Sea Surface Temperature anomalies (detrended) are typically used to illustrate the multidecadal variations in the temperature of the North Atlantic. Again, like the global data, we’ll have to assume that the Marine Air Temperature outputs of the model mimic the Sea Surface Temperatures. The second concern is that land makes up 24% of the area included in the coordinates used for the North Atlantic (0-70N, 80W-0), as shown in Figure 6. The variability of land surface temperature can be different than that of Sea Surface Temperatures.
Figure 6
But as we can see in Figure 7, the instrument observation-based Sea Surface Temperature anomalies of the North Atlantic are tracked quite closely by the observed Land-Plus-Sea Surface Temperature anomalies of the North Atlantic “Plus” (where the “Plus” includes the additional Land Surface Temperature anomaly data encompassed by those coordinates).
Figure 7
The NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) uses a 121-month running-average filter to smooth their Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation data. Refer to the ESRL AMO webpage. If we smooth the North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature anomalies and the North Atlantic “Plus” Land+Sea Surface Temperature anomaly observations using the same 121-month filter, Figure 8, we can see the two curves are nearly identical.
Figure 8
So for the purpose of this post, the comparison of Land+Sea Surface Temperature anomalies to the Surface Air Temperature anomalies of the CCSM4 hindcasts will provide a preliminary look at whether there is a multidecadal component in the North Atlantic “Plus” data where one would expect to find it.
Animation 3 compares observed North Atlantic “Plus” Surface (Land+Sea) Temperature anomalies to the modeled Surface Air Temperatures for the 6 individual ensemble members and the ensemble mean. All data have been smoothed with a 121-month filter. Only two of the six ensemble members hint at multidecadal variability, but the frequency and magnitude are not comparable to the observations.
Animation 3
The NCAR CCSM4 coupled climate model appears to do a poor job of hindcasting the multidecadal variability of North Atlantic temperature anomalies.
NOTE ON MULTIDECADAL VARIABILITY OF MODELS
NOTE: Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist at NCAR, and a lead author of three IPCC reports, provided a good overview of the models used in the IPCC AR4 released in 2007. Refer to Nature’s Climate Feedback: Predictions of climate post. There he writes:
“None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match today’s state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.”
I suspect we’ll see a similar proclamation when AR5 is published.
Kevin Trenberth then tries to explain in the Nature.com article linked above why the differences between the observations and the models do not matter. But they do matter. When a climate change layman (one who makes the effort to look) discovers that the NCAR model CCSM4 hindcasts a global temperature anomaly curve that warms 50% faster than the observed rise from 1900 to 2005 (as shown in Animation 2), they question the model’s ability to project future global temperatures. The perception is, if the hindcast is 50% too high, then the projections must be at least 50% too high. And when the models don’t resemble the global temperature observations, inasmuch as the models do not have the multidecadal variations of the instrument temperature record, the layman becomes wary. They casually research and discover that natural multidecadal variations have stopped the global warming in the past for 30 years, and they believe it can happen again. Also, the layman can see very clearly that the models have latched onto a portion of the natural warming trends, and that the models have projected upwards from there, continuing the naturally higher multidecadal trend, without considering the potential for a future flattening for two or three or four decades. In short, to the layman, the models appear bogus.
A NOTE ABOUT MARINE AIR VERSUS SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES
Sea Surface Temperature anomaly data are used in the GISS, Hadley Centre, and NCDC global temperature anomaly products. Yet as shown earlier, there are Marine Air Temperature datasets available. I used one, the Hadley Centre’s MOHMAT, in Figures 1 and 2. Sea Surface Temperatures are used for a number of reasons, some of which are discussed in Chapter 3 of the IPCC AR4. (24MB). (A word find of “Marine” or “NMAT”, without the quotes, will bring you to the discussions.) One of the reasons Sea Surface Temperature data is preferred is data availability. If you thought the global source data coverage for Sea Surface Temperature data was poor, there are even fewer instrument observations for Marine Air Temperature. Animation 4 illustrates a series of maps that indicate in purple which 5 deg by 5 deg grids contain data. It doesn’t indicate whether there are 30 observations, or 300, or 1 in a given month, just that there is data in a purple grid. The Animation 4 starts with January 1900 and progresses on a decadal basis through January 2000.
Animation 4
As illustrated, Marine Air Temperature observations in the Southern Hemisphere are rare south of 30S before 1950, they’re rare globally for that matter in the first half of the 20thCentury, and data is virtually nonexistent north of 60N in the Northern Hemisphere even through 2000.
Based on that, we’ll limit the comparisons of observed and modeled Marine Air and Sea Surface Temperature data for the global oceans to 30S-60N, and start them in 1950. The end month of December 1999 is dictated by the hindcasts of the NCAR CCSM3, which is the earlier version of that NCAR coupled climate model. Also note that there was only 1 model run for the CCSM3 Sea Surface Temperatures at the KNMI Climate Explorer.
Figure 9 compares the linear trends of a Marine Air Temperature anomaly dataset (MOHMAT) to two Sea Surface Temperature datasets (HADSST2 and HADISST) for the latitudes of 30S to 60N, from January 1950 to December 1999. These are instrument observation-based datasets. As illustrated, the Marine Air Temperature anomalies rise at a rate that is significantly less than the two Sea Surface Temperature anomaly datasets. The linear trend of the Marine Air Temperature anomalies is about 52% of the average of the trends for the two Sea Surface Temperature anomaly datasets.
Figure 9
On the other hand, the modeled ensemble mean for the Marine Air Temperature output of the NCAR CCSM3 (earlier version) has a linear trend that is more than double the trend of the modeled Sea Surface Temperature anomalies. The relationship is backwards. Does this backwards relationship between Sea Surface and Marine Air Temperatures continue to exist in the CCSM4?
Figure 10
CLOSING
The preliminary look at the hindcasts of the NCAR CCSM4 sheds a different light on the model-based papers of Meehl et al (2011) and Stevenson et al (2011). Those papers are based on a coupled climate model that cannot reproduce essential portions of the 20thCentury Surface Temperature observations.
No matter how well the NCAR CCSM4 can simulate certain aspects and processes of global climate, the fact that it cannot reproduce many portions of the instrument temperature record during the 20thCentury emphasizes failings that call into question its ability to project future global or regional climate change.
SOURCE
All observation-based data presented in the post are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer Monthly observationswebpage, with one exception.
The NCAR NINO3.4 data used in Figure 5 is available through the NCAR TNI (Trans-Niño Index) and N3.4 (Niño 3.4 Index) webpage.
The NCAR CCSM4 and CCSM3 model output data are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer also, through the Monthly CMIP5 scenario runs and Monthly CMIP3+ scenario runs webpages, respectively.
jorgekafkazar says:
November 5, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Humans thus also have a tendency to imagine they see other patterns when there are none–Giovanni Schiaparelli’s Martian canals, for one notable example.
That would explain Hansen and Gore looking at the long term graphs of CO2 and Temperature.
R. Gates says:
November 6, 2011 at 6:18 am
Don K, thanks for reconfirming what I was telling davidmhoffer. >>>
He did no such thing. If you were familiar with the studies he is referring to, you would know that that the outcome of nuclear war is now thought to be warming, not cooling. which would accelerate the trend, not mask it as per your claim. That’s why he said that the whole “nuclear winter” theory came crashing down. You’re claiming support from science that disputes you!
Further, you’ve changed your position. I never said that sulfate aerosols couldn’t mask the warming from CO2. Obviously, ANYTHING that has a cooling effect could mask warming from any source. Your claim was that the models tell us to expect periods of no warming. I’ve been listening to the braying of the CAGW cult for years now, and I never heard any such thing UNTIL the evidence that we have been experiencing little or no warming for the last ten years became over whelming. Suddenly you and your ilk are shouting that the models always predicted that?
Where? The study you pointed to shows that sulfate aerosols can have a negative effect that makes it harder to detect the positive effect of CO2. No where in that paper did it make predictions about the future to the effect that we should see cycles during which there is no warming. At best, you could conclude from that paper that a given amount of sulfate aerosols would cause cooling that cancels out warming from CO2, but at no point in the paper did they PREDICT that we should expect long periods of no warming.
IPCC AR4 WG1 goes to great lengths to show 22 models that are in general agreement with each other, and ALL of them predict not just continued warming, but accelerated warming. Read all the SRES scenarios which go into fantastic detail about the range of PREDICTED warming for various CO2 levels, not one of which PREDICTED periods of little or no warming, much less cooling. Study after study has been held up at the UN and various climate conferences claiming doom and gloom and showing hockey stick graphs, screaming “its happening already” from the tops of their lungs, getting the whole world in a lather about how bad it is going to be and how little time we have left to act before the world hits some sort of point of no return and society collapses.
I’ve been listening to this blather since Kyoto. Not once did anyone stand up and say, well, we’ll see bursts of warming and decade long pauses in between. No sir, just hockey stick graphs and lineups of scientists screaming that the science was settled, there was no question about this, not argument to be had, nothing to debate, but give us a few hundred billion in research dollars anyway.
Now, after decades of alarmism, pressure tactics, demands that we do something and do it now before we reach a point of no return, the message subtly changes to, well, we should do something even though we don’t have proof JUST IN CASE and now the message has changed yet again to….shrug…10 years of no warming…yeah, we said that would happen.
BULL SH*T.
jorgekafkazar says:
November 5, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Humans thus also have a tendency to imagine they see other patterns when there are none–Giovanni Schiaparelli’s Martian canals, for one notable example.
It looks like the science isn’t settled on Mars either.
November 13, 2003
Details in a fan-shaped deposit discovered by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter provide evidence that some ancient rivers on Mars flowed for a long time, not just in brief, intense floods.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA04869
more from the same article, on Martian climate change:
Mars’ atmosphere is so thin, over most of the planet, any liquid water at the surface would rapidly evaporate or freeze, so evidence of persistent surface water in the past is also evidence for a more clement past climate.
davidmhoffer says:
November 6, 2011 at 8:05 am
I’ve been listening to this blather since Kyoto. Not once did anyone stand up and say, well, we’ll see bursts of warming and decade long pauses in between. No sir, just hockey stick graphs and lineups of scientists screaming that the science was settled, there was no question about this, not argument to be had, nothing to debate, but give us a few hundred billion in research dollars anyway.
To be fair, some did stand up. They were called “deniers” or worse. Vilified in the press, they were likened to child killers, destroying future generations. Lost their jobs. Had their careers ruined. Leading scientists called for them to be jailed. A movie was made showing them being blown up, in an era of terrorist bombings.
But to be fair, some did stand up.
Dave Springer says: “Get rid of the animations. Seriously, lose them. The data I wanted to see didn’t stay on the screen long enough for me to get a handle on it. There are also FAR too many charts. I’m sure there’s something of great interest here but the presentation sucks so bad I can’t find it.”
Dave, I’m glad you found something that interested you in the post. Had you asked me to provide you a link to the specific cell in the animation that interested you, I would have been happy to do so. But, since you chose a different tack, here’s a link to the source of the data CCSM4 model data:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_cmip5.cgi?someone@somewhere
The animations served a purpose. They allowed me to illustrate the differences between the observed temperature data and not only the model mean (which is overused in comparisons), but also the individual ensemble members that make up the mean.
With respect to the number of illustrations, there are precisely the number I believed was necessary for the post. And I have presented exactly what I felt was necessary to illustrate the shortcomings of the NCAR CCSM4. You apparently believe I should have done so in some other way. Maybe you could examine the NCAR CCSM4 data and present it as you’d like in post of your own. Anthony is always looking for guest authors.
@Tisdale
If I had trouble with so did others. I shan’t offer constructive criticism to you again since you seem incapable of accepting it with any measure of grace. Too bad. Your loss not mine.
REPLY: There’s an old saying, “you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar“. As Bob Mentions, if you can do better, please by all means submit a guest post. – Anthony
ferd berple;
But to be fair, some did stand up.>>>
For certain they did. But my accusation was levelled at the warmist scientists, not the skeptic scientists. The IPCC AR4 report claims continued warming without pause from one end to the other. Mann, Briffa, Hansen, Trenberth, Jones, Schmidt…and on and on. Of the warmist scientists who have been preaching doom and gloom, demanding that the world act to restrict CO2 emissions, arguing that skeptics should be jailed or worse, did any of THEM say that there would be long periods without warming? Not before we actually HAD a long period without warming. If Mosher wants to point to some “minority” models that supposedly showed such a thing, he is welcome to do so. But I never heard boo in all the years I’ve been following this nonsense from the likes of the IPCC and their sycophants that the models predicted any such thing. Now they want to claim that the models always predicted this? Bull Sh*t.
Further, I challenge this notion that the current sulfate aerosols are masking the warming. Really? Where did they come from? Where are they? Remember 30 years ago when stand up comics had lines like “I was in LA and shot an arrow into the sky. It stuck there.”? Do you hear smog jokes like that anymore? Do we have waves of people coming into hospitals on high smog days with respitory problems like we did a few decades ago? How long has it been since the allowable levels of sulfur in diesel fuel were dropped to nearly zero? How many years has it been that scrubbers have been mandatory on coal fired power plants?
The fact is that the western world has dramatically reduced aerosol emissions of all sorts and we have the cleanest air across the board that we’ve had in decades. Even farming practices have changed because losing top soil as dust to the air is just bad for crop production. So where are these aerosols suddenly coming from?
India? China? LOL. They may be ramping up, but the fact of the matter is that what they are building today may look large on paper in comparison to where the western world is, but the fact of the matter is that the dirtiest plants they build today are still far cleaner than what we ourselves used to run a few decades ago. If they are contributing to the level of aerosols, I will buy that.
The notion that they are contributing SO much that they both make up for what we NO LONGER contribute, PLUS enough more to mask the effects of CO2?
Well possibly. Provided that the effects of CO2 are very, very, very, tiny.
@Tisdale
What I was trying to find was a stationary comparison of land surface temperature actual and model hindcast. I’m sure many such are blinking by in the animations but it the labels hardly persist long enough to read them to say nothing of reading the label and then looking at the graph before its gone. I’m sure that you are so familiar with what’s being portrayed this doesn’t seem like a problem but trust me it’s a got to be a problem for others as well. Fix it or f**k it, I don’t really care. There’s too much other stuff worth reading and too little time to read it to worry about what I missed out on in this missive of yours.
Dave Springer says:
November 6, 2011 at 9:54 am
REPLY: There’s an old saying, “you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar“. As Bob Mentions, if you can do better, please by all means submit a guest post. – Anthony
Really? I guess you didn’t learn much from Andy Rooney then.
Davidmhoffer,
I pointed you to a research article based on climate models written prior to the current plateau in warming that quite explicitly said that anthropogenic aerosols might mask anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming for a period of at least 20 years, and that period could be even longer if other aerosol and solar forcings are included, which they were not for this piece of research. Here is that article again:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/vml28620367lw244/fulltext.pdf
Now, this isn’t good enough for you, though it is exactly what you asked for. Instead it seems, you want to misrepresent what is shown quite clearly in the study referenced above, and furthermore, it seems you, along with certain AGW skeptics, want to use this period of clearly increasing aerosols and the quietest sun we’ve seen in a century to further, what I feel is, your attempt to cast doubt about the physical reality of anthropogenic global warming.
I guess the old saying is, “make hay when the sun shines”, or in the case of skeptics, when it does not. It will be interesting to see what excuses skeptics use when temperatures resume their inevitable upward trend in the coming decades. Here’s a few likely ones:
Recovery from the Little Ice Age
Continued residual heat from the 1998 El Nino
Natural Variability
Reduction of Cosmic rays
PDO warm phase resuming
Errors in data gathering
Etc etc etc.
Finally, one of the most exciting things about the current quiet sun period is that perhaps we’ll finally be able to really quantify all the dynamics of the solar influences on climate. We are already seeing this with the EUV/stratospheric circulation being added to some of the models. But of course, more work remains.
@Anthony
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
The usual comeback to the trite saying about flies and catching more with honey than vinegar is that you catch more flies with sh-t than you do with honey. At any rate the message got through. Acting differently on it because of the tone is just being petulant.
At any rate, as long we’re into trite expressions here’s one for you and Tisdale: Don’t shoot the messenger.
REPLY: By the same token, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” could also be good advice to you regarding Tisdale’s presentation. Bottom line, nobody else is complaining about this post except you. If there were multiple complaints, I’d suggest to Bob that a revision might be in order – but there aren’t. Pielke Sr. has highlighted it too. Sorry, I just don’t take your issue seriously, and quite frankly I think your complaint is petty. – Anthony
Here’s a paper from over 20 years ago by the beloved James Hansen quite germaine to the topic. Talks about masking of the greenhouse signal by other forcings, etc. Most of you have probably read this, but just in case:
http://hokulea.soest.hawaii.edu/ocn435/papers/1990_Hansen_Lacis.pdf
R. Gates;
So you’ve got some papers that amount to, if you read them carefully, “its worse than we thought”.
I didn’t ask you to point to papers by known warmist scientists that show that various forcings can mask the greenhouse effect. One would have to be daft to argue that. What I asked for was PREDICTIONS by those scientists that we would experience periods of no warming at all.
Spin it any way you want, the cheerleaders for CAGW never said anything about expecting a period with no warming at all. They quantified (supposedly accurately) the effects of aerosols. So what?
Point at the quotes that show they said periods of many years without any warming should be EXPECTED.
R. Gates;
Instead it seems, you want to misrepresent what is shown quite clearly in the study referenced above, and furthermore, it seems you, along with certain AGW skeptics, want to use this period of clearly increasing aerosols and the quietest sun we’ve seen in a century to further, what I feel is, your attempt to cast doubt about the physical reality of anthropogenic global warming. >>>
There ya go putting words in my mouth. Bull Sh*t. I never said there was no such thing as AGW, I’ve argued long and hard with plenty of skeptics on this forum explaining how CO2 DOES in fact cause direct warming. The question is what is the NET warming? But since you accuse me of misrepresenting the facts, let’s return to your original claim, which is that the models ALWAYS told us that there would be periods without warming. Throw all the papers about aerosols masking the warming that you wish. But show me one claim by warmist scientists PREDICTING the we would in the FUTURE see periods of no warming that was made BEFORE the current period of no warming. Show me ONE graph, one SENTENCE in IPCC AR4 that says ANYTHING of the sort, anythiong other than CONTINUED AND ACCELERATING WARMING. All you can come up with some papers showing that sulfate aerosols are a negative forcing, SO WHAT?
Your claim was that the models predicted this. Show me where they predicted it. Show me where the climate alarmists said anything like “there will be periods without warming 10 to 15 years long despite CO2 increases”
This is no different than the bet you welched on. The facts are that:
1. You defended Al Gore’s experiment as an illustration only, and maintained that the experiment was valid.
2. I said I would wager that if the experiment was done as illustrated, it would NOT show the results as illustrated.
3. You IMMEDIATELY said you would accept the wager, and asked me how much.
4. I asked if you would accept Anthony’s results, and you immediately tried to impose conditions on the manner in which the experiment was conducted. Including suggesting that the globes be taken out of the jars, showing the you fail to understand how the CO2 “greenhouse” effect actually works since having the globes in the jars is the ONLY way the experiment could have possibly worked.
5. Upon Anthony clearly demonstrating by duplicating the experiment, that Al Gore’s results were not seen in any way shape or form and could not possibly produce the results shown in Al Gore’s faked…oops…”iilustration” according to you…experiment.
6. I called you on it, and you came up with the feeble excuse that all Anthony’s experiment showed was that Anchor Hawking glass absorbed IR.
BUT THAT WASN’T THE BET, WAS IT?
The bet was that if Al Gore’s experiment was repeated as illustrated, it would not show the results that were illustrated.
You’ve yet to admit that you were totaly and completely wrong, tried to redefing the experiment, tried to redefine the results, and tried to redefine the bet. Its all there in the various threads, in your own words, yet you spin one story after another hoping that you’ll sound credible enough that others won’t go and check the facts.
That you then come back at me and accuse ME of misrepresenting the facts is just pathetic and lamentable. Partly because I’m starting to think you believe your own total bull sh*t and partly because I fear the uninformed might.
steven mosher says:
November 6, 2011 at 12:02 am
“Dirk. line up behind david and get some data. its free”
I’m not interested in more model output. I’d like to hear you refute what I said. How long is the time lag for water vapour feedback in your models? A day? 30 years? What assumptions do your models use?
Mark says:
November 6, 2011 at 11:24 am
“Didn’t know that the hindcasting was so bad. One would have thought they could get at least the past right (maybe they didn’t even try; their mission might have been something else).”
ATTN mods !! a new spam tactic: They took a comment from me and reposted it, and insert a link to a pr0n page as their website.
[Reply: Thanks. That comment is now deleted. ~dbs, mod.]
R. Gates says:
November 6, 2011 at 10:06 am
I realise you are trying to prop up the losing side – which is your perogative – but if it is based on belief (as it appears) – you are sorely lacking in the ‘objective view’ department. As soon as I saw your post and the first listed excuse – I was incensed!
I (like many others I am sure) am open to any discussion regarding AGW so long as it’s based on logical and defensible scientifically based proof – so for example, re my previous posts, can you tell me of a single climate model that has, as a base line trend, a built in ‘allowance’ for the ice age recovery? And before you reply – I ask (nay, I INSIST!) that you do NOT quote ANYTHING – unless there is a full paper, complete with documentary evidence, code, workings, of the model that shows this has been done. (to my knowledge, you’d probably be googling for a long time – and still find nothing!). I warn you – do NOT reply unless you can provide such evidence – as you will be well and truly ridiculed….
If, as I suspect, you cannot produce such evidence, do not use Recovery from the Last Ice Age as it being produced as some kind of sceptic excuse – it is not an excuse – it is a damn fact! – just like if the situation was reversed and we were heading onto severe cooling, the last ice age would be used as a precedent – in both cases, these things have happened without ANY anthropogenic help! Yeah, man – you know – they were NATURAL events! Disprove it – or shut the feck up – it is pretty well accepted fact – indeed, it is more FACTUAL than the concensus of AGW theory – live with it!
That statement has made me really angry – to me, it demonstrates complete ignorance – because you clearly have no concept of temporal or thermal scales in the context of earths climate….
Because YOU listed it first in your list, I will attack it first…
are you suggesting that there is no thermal (as in temperature) recovery from the last ice age?
are you suggesting that changes from known ice age to non-ice age periods are instantaneous global temperature changes – with no ‘interglacial periods’ or gradual warming/cooling periods?
please cite the documents proving this apparent assumption on your part….
It is simple -put up or shut up!
I am perfectly willing to accept that folk make wild assumptions – but you have taken the biscuit on this one boyo…if you cannot provide documentary evidence of actual real scientific proof that pre-ice age cooling and post ice age warming do not exist (which any normal person would find ridiculous) – I suggest you’d better retract your suggestion that ice age recovery is some form of ‘excuse’ – it’s not – it’s a fact, and moreover it’s a fact you CANNOT dismiss, no matter how stupid/blind or plain damned ignorant you are.
Of course the models are rubbish as the assumptions are ridiculous. But they “project” temperatures not “temperature anomalies” and the “temperature anomalies” are not actual temperature observations but a multiple averaging of an average of meximum and minimum in unrepresentative sites whose represenattivity and numbers constantly change, where the combined uncertainty, if properly assessed woulod be huge. All the “trends”, including those in this paper, are meaningless.
Dave Springer says: “Fix it or f**k it, I don’t really care.”
If you don’t really care, why have you complained?
It is not impossible to simulate the ENSO cycle, if one bases one’s model on ENSO being a nonlinear oscillator. The classic Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction – the school-lab example of a chemical nonlinear oscillator, has been modelled successfully many times including be the well-known Brusselator simulation. (Look up both the BZ reaction and the Brusselator on wiki). The ingredients for a nonlnear oscillator are:
– a system far from equilibrium
– an open system with constant energy input
– the presence of positive feedbacks making the medium “reactive” or “excitable”
– in balance to the positive feedbacks, negative feedbacks are also present contributing dissipation or damping (or “friction”)
– periodic forcing of the system from outside (optional but helpful in tuning to the right frequency behaviour)
A paragidm shift is needed to build simulation to achieve nonlinear oscillation – however a problem might well be that runs would be wildly different from eachother due to the chaotic element.
OK “paradigm” then..
Kev-in-Uk says:
November 6, 2011 at 12:59 pm
I (like many others I am sure) am open to any discussion regarding AGW so long as it’s based on logical and defensible scientifically based proof – so for example, re my previous posts, can you tell me of a single climate model that has, as a base line trend, a built in ‘allowance’ for the ice age recovery? And before you reply – I ask (nay, I INSIST!) that you do NOT quote ANYTHING – unless there is a full paper, complete with documentary evidence, code, workings, of the model that shows this has been done. (to my knowledge, you’d probably be googling for a long time – and still find nothing!). I warn you – do NOT reply unless you can provide such evidence – as you will be well and truly ridiculed…
___
Thank you for your kind “warnings” about be ridiculed. (more about that in a moment), but to be fair, you asked if any single climate model has built in allowance for an “ice age” recovery. Of course, in answering this, I really need you to be a bit more scientific and precise in your question if you expect me to be the same in my answer. Are are speaking a bit in layman’s terminology in talking about an “ice age” recovery, as perhaps you’ve watched the animated movie “Ice Age” and don’t realized that they are really talking about a glacial period, and not a real “ice age” in a scientific sense? But a movie called “Glacial Period” would not have been too popular at the box office would it. For certainly the world is still in an ice age in the scientific sense, and has been for several million years, and any model for the recovery from it would have to cover millions of yearsi. Or perhaps you really meant the very inappropriately named “Little Ice Age”, which was of course really just a cool period of the current interglacial. So please be more precise and truly scientific in your question, and I will be able to do the same in my answer.
Now, back to your “warning” to me. How dare you!? You treat me like a school-boy with you as he head master and then spout out some quite unscientific question?! Please treat me with respect and I shall do the same to you. There is no reason for admonishments and lots of warnings with all caps in your postings here. (see davidmhoffers recent posts to me for perfect example of over use of this). I can get your point just fine without the use of all caps.
So please formulate your question to me using precise scientific terms, so I don’t have to guess at your real meaning, and I’ll be glad to do my best to answer in a scientific way, citing scientific papers and research. You respect me and I shall respect you. Easy.
R. Gates;
There is no reason for admonishments and lots of warnings with all caps in your postings here. (see davidmhoffers recent posts to me for perfect example of over use of this).>>>
You mean the one where I pointed out that you had repeatedly avoided answering the questions I had asked and instead were responding to things that I never said? The one where I used caps to emphasize the very specifics and narrow scientific definitions that you claim you are demanding? Could you quote the exact words that you claim are “admonishments” and “warnings”?
And, while you are at it, could you answer the f|***ing questions?
As for answering scientific questions, I have some for you.
1. How do you explain your comment that the globes in Al Gore’s experiment to demonstrate the warming effects of CO2 were superflous?
2. Can you explain how the experiment could possibly demonstrate the “greenhouse effect” when the only heating source was IR?
3. Do you understand the “greenhouse effect” in enough detail to explain what the heating source should have been, and why the globes were necessary to the experiment?
4. If you can explain question 3 above properly, then could you also explain how it is that you got questions 1 and 2 hopelessly wrong when discussing the experiment in the first place?
Good luck with that R. Gates. You demonstrated quite nicely that you haven’t a clue about the science in question through what you’ve already said about the experiment. You simply parrot the words of others, and when backed into a corner about the specifics, you display a complete lack of understanding of the fundamentals combined with your only real talent, which seems to be the ability to confuse the issue rather than confronting it.
Which is it R. Gates? Can you answer question 3? And if so, how is it that you said the globes were superflous? If you can answer question 3, how is it that you failed to understand that the results of the experiment as depicted by Al Gore were impossible using IR as the only heating source?
You demand scientific precision and respect from others, but treat us with disdain while blowing smoke up our ***. The precision of your science is nothing more than parroting the words of others while making it clear you understand them not at all, and the total bull sh*t that you heap upon us hoping we’ll never see through the smoke screen of your ignorance says everything that needs to be said about your respect for others.
davidmhoffer,
Nice to see your behavior can change. Thanks for losing the all caps. Now to work a bit on your anger management.
I’ll hold my knowledge of climate dynamics up against yours anytime. I don’t blow smoke up anyone’s arse when it comes to these things and readily admit when I’m mistaken and move on. You however become fixated, and in my opinion, this is detrimental to your intellectual growth.
R. Gates says:
November 6, 2011 at 10:42 pm
davidmhoffer,
Nice to see your behavior can change. Thanks for losing the all caps. Now to work a bit on your anger management.>>>
Once again R. Gates changes the subject rather than answering the questions he was asked.
R. Gates;
I’ll hold my knowledge of climate dynamics up against yours anytime.>>>
Then do so. Answer the questions.
R. Gates;
I don’t blow smoke up anyone’s arse when it comes to these things and readily admit when I’m mistaken and move on.>>>
Really? You admit when you are wrong? Did you admit you lost the wager with me? (which you did in fact lose). Did you explain the “greenhouse effect” as I asked you to? No you did not. Why not? Because you can’t? Or because if you could it would expose the shear stupidity you displayed when insisting that Al Gore’s experiment would, if conducted as illustrated, produce the results as illustrated?
I’m still looking for an answer to my questions upthread as well. Is there a single sentence, graph, anything, anything at all, in IPCC AR1, 2, 3, or 4 PREDICTING that warming would take a 10 to 15 year pause? You claimed the models told us this. Stop distracting the argument with papers about aerosols and just back your claim up. Show a quote from any AGW proponent scientist, or any pro AGW paper, that says CO2 warms the earth but we shold expect 10 to 15 year pauses in the warming.
You keep evading the questions, and then have the gall to claim expertise, and, even more ridiculous, you have the audacity to claim you don’t blow smoke up anyone’s arse? Read through your own words. You’re now blowing smoke up my a** about blowing smoke up my a**.
R. Gates;
You however become fixated, and in my opinion, this is detrimental to your intellectual growth.>>>
You however use avoidance, change the subject, change what you said, change what I said, anything to avoid dealing directly with your duplicity. In my opinion, this is detrimental to your growth as an ethical and honest human being.