From their Die kalte Sonne website, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt and Dr. Sebastian Lüning put up this guest Post by Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim (Oslo) on Hansen’s 1988 forecast, and show that Hansen was and is, way off the mark. h/t to Pierre Gosselin of No Tricks Zone and WUWT reader tips.
Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988. The various scenarios are 1.5% CO 2 increase (blue), constant increase in CO 2 emissions (green) and stagnant CO 2 emissions (red). In reality, the increase in CO 2 emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve. The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average). Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong. Figure supplemented by Hansen et al. (1988) .
One of the most important publications on the “dangerous anthropogenic climate change” is that of James Hansen and colleagues from the year 1988, in the Journal of Geophysical Research published. The title of the work is (in German translation) “Global climate change, according to the prediction of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.”
In this publication, Hansen and colleagues present the GISS Model II, with which they simulate climate change as a result of concentration changes of atmospheric trace gases and particulate matter (aerosols). The scientists here are three scenarios:
A: increase in CO 2 emissions by 1.5% per year
B: constant increase in CO 2 emissions after 2000
C: No increase in CO 2 emissions after 2000
The CO 2 emissions since 2000 to about 2.5 percent per year has increased, so that we would expect according to the Hansen paper a temperature rise, which should be stronger than in model A. Figure 1 shows the three Hansen scenarios and the real measured global temperature curve are shown. The protruding beyond Scenario A arrow represents the temperature value that the Hansen team would have predicted on the basis of a CO 2 increase of 2.5%. Be increased according to the Hansen’s forecast, the temperature would have compared to the same level in the 1970s by 1.5 ° C. In truth, however, the temperature has increased by only 0.6 ° C.
It is apparent that the next to it by the Hansen group in 1988 modeled temperature prediction by about 150%. It is extremely regrettable that precisely this type of modeling of our politicians is still regarded as a reliable climate prediction.
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KR says:
June 15, 2012 at 9:50 am
A fascinating, and incorrect, post. Given actual CO2 emissions and the reduction in greenhouse-active CFC’s due to the Montreal Protocol, forcings have been closest to the “B” scenario – about 5-10% below “B” scenario total forcing. Not the “A” scenario as argued here. That is a strawman argument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man). It might be reasonable to argue that Hansen didn’t predict economics very well, but then again this was a _climate_ model, not an _economic_ model.
Assuming that CO2 is the only active greenhouse gas is a common, but serious, error. CFC decreases were huge.
Hansen did use a 4.2°C per doubling sensitivity – now thought to be too high, with ~3°C the current estimate. That resulted in a slight overestimate of warming, with the model showing an overestimate of ~20% when run with actual forcings. It’s noteworthy that Hansen’s 1988 regional temperature distribution predictions (regional predictions being an issue many folks seem to raise with climate models) are quite accurate (see http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf, Plate 2).
The sensitivity estimate he used in 1988 (considered reasonable then) was rather too high, and considering actual forcings (given political and economic developments) close to the “B” scenario, Hansen’s 1988 model was surprisingly good.
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Soooooo …… The take away is that the climate model from the Wizard of COz is wrong because it didn’t (couldn’t?) account for everything that could effect climate … even out to just a couple of decades. And we should trust his work to the tune of trillions of dollars and the surrender freedoms to the UN?
What climate model prediction do you suggest we trust that accounts for all the possible variables, known and unknown, out to a hundred years? Manns’ “postdictions” based on synthetic (Mann-made) inputs?
Extrapolation (projecting out into the data nowhere) will get you in trouble every time. Always a bad idea! In fact, Extrapolation herself should be arrested with Hansen next time they are out predicting-about together, always on co2 ‘death trains’ of course.
The real fact is that those “death trains” and the vast energy they contain have extended human life expectancy more that any other single factor in the history of human kind through inexpensive and continuous electricity.
I don’t know what Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim is a professor of, but that is one exceptionally shoddy analysis. A professor should be able to do a better analysis than an amateur like me, not vice-versa.
[REPLY: Google is your friend, Dana. http://www.mn.uio.no/astro/english/people/aca/janeso/index.html -REP]
If thirty years ago we had gathered all of the Climate modelers into a room and given them coins to flip, heads the climate warms, tails the climate cools, and then given each of them a million dollars to go away, half of them would have been right and we would have saved billions that could have been put to productive use
[Moderator’s Note: It is not a good idea to use an e-mail address as a screen name, so I’ve taken the liberty of removing the identifying portion of your screen name. -REP]
Alcheson says:
June 15, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Because Hansen did not include CFCs in his model calculations to produce this infamous graph,he CANNOT now subtract them out to get a better fit with his CO2 graph. If he is to do that properly, then he would have to show a graph that included the warming effect of the CFCs which would generate a warming curve significantly higher than curve A. Subtraction of the CFC’s effect then lead right back to his curve A. His graph is specifically calculated for CO2, there is NO effect of CFCs in his graph for which a subtraction would be valid.
Why don’t you actually read the work you criticize? Hansen used the data on CFCs from the Chemical Manufacturer’s Association for F-11 and F-12 in scenario A ( a growth rate of 3%/yr).
To make such incorrect statements just removes all credibility you might have had!
Alcheson says:
June 15, 2012 at 1:13 pm
Another way of looking at it, when Hansen made his projections, he assumed that the only non-zero forcing was CO2 to make his graph. His graph projection already had made the assumption that the effect of CFC’s was zero. Scenario A is what warming should have occurred due to CO2 with a value of ZERO for all other forcings. The additional warming effect of the CFC’s should lead to even more warming than predicted by CO2 only (curve A). not less.
Again total rubbish, try reading page 9361!
Yet Hansen is prepared to be arrested based on his beliefs rather than observed data. Thank God we didn’t take drastic action back then otherwise he would be revered today as being correct. FAIL! No panic over a non-problem.
burkebri says:
June 15, 2012 at 1:24 pm
If thirty years ago we had gathered all of the Climate modelers into a room and given them coins to flip, heads the climate warms, tails the climate cools, and then given each of them a million dollars to go away, half of them would have been right and we would have saved billions that could have been put to productive use”
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Ha ha ha ha but TRUE! 🙂
Kelvin Vaughan says:
June 15, 2012 at 12:22 pm
which is a whopping 150% wrong
You can’t be more than 100% wrong!
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Yet he managed it anyway! 😎
Or if you maintain that Hansens’s projections included as KR says
A: 0.6 CO2, another 0.8 from CFC’s, methane, N2O, etc. ~1.45 W/m^2
B: ~0.6 CO2, 0.4 from other gases. A bit under 1 W/m^2.
C: ~0.4 total, mostly CO2. 0.4 W/m^2.
Then curve A and B are NOT showing projected warming simply due to CO2, but due to CFCs and other trace gases. It was sold to the public as being the projected warming due to CO2 only and that if we didn’t drastically cut CO2 that this was our future. If you show a graph that includes many variables but claim only one (CO2) is important, isn’t that fraud?
Analysis of the graph shows that warming due to CO2 increases is NOT very much, since the , reduction in CFCs alone resulted in a near zero net forcing for the past 15 years.
So I take it that Hansen’s model results are worse than a “random walk” but some people here seem to think Hansen’s faulty projection based on his AGW theory is more acceptable than monkeys churning out numbers even though the monkeys would on average be closer to the answer. Talk about faith!! You guys are true believers. No matter how wrong and consistently so Hansen and his fellow AGW climate advocates are, you find a way to excuse their failure. So when after a decade of negative temperature trend for the world at large, you practice Cognitive Dissonance rationalizing away why it is acceptable for the results to be opposite what’s happening in the real world.
Funny, in the real world when you consistently forecast in error you cease to have credibility. But then every day weather people display the forecast that more often than not turn out to be wrong for a seven day time period. It just goes to show people want to know what the future holds to the point they are held captive by it and are suckers for the prognosticators.
Junk Science Week: Climate models fail reality test
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/13/junk-science-week-climate-models-fail-reality-test/
A 2011 study in the Journal of Forecasting took the same data set and compared model predictions against a “random walk” alternative, consisting simply of using the last period’s value in each location as the forecast for the next period’s value in that location. The test measures the sum of errors relative to the random walk. A perfect model gets a score of zero, meaning it made no errors. A model that does no better than a random walk gets a score of 1. A model receiving a score above 1 did worse than uninformed guesses. Simple statistical forecast models that have no climatology or physics in them typically got scores between 0.8 and 1, indicating slight improvements on the random walk, though in some cases their scores went as high as 1.8.
The climate models, by contrast, got scores ranging from 2.4 to 3.7, indicating a total failure to provide valid forecast information at the regional level, even on long time scales. The authors commented: “This implies that the current [climate] models are ill-suited to localized decadal predictions, even though they are used as inputs for policymaking.”
The bottom line here is only when people are dying by the thousands of cold and hunger even then will you not relent until you are the ones doing the dying of cold and hunger. Nature has a cruel but efficient way to weed out the foolish, unwise, unfit and defective, REALITY. Nature will herself delete you from the gene pool on her own time table, I therefore need do or say nothing but to observe the inevitable. And the monkeys crank on…
dana1981 says:
June 15, 2012 at 1:23 pm
I don’t know what Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim is a professor of, but that is one exceptionally shoddy analysis. A professor should be able to do a better analysis than an amateur like me, not vice-versa.
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With bated breath we await your analysis / debunking.
Thanks REP. As someone with an astrophysics degree myself, allow me to apologize on behalf of the astrophysics field for this absolutely amateurish error-riddled analysis by Solheim. Though I see he’s one of Humlum’s buddies – that explains the poor analysis. Let’s see how many errors we can identify in this very short post:
1) Comparing the supposed rate of emissions increase since 2000 to Hansen’s scenarios (which begin in 1984, as I recall)
2) Thinking that a ~2 ppm annual CO2 increase is 2.5% of ~390 ppm (arithmetic fail!)
3) Ignoring all non-CO2 GHGs in Hansen’s Scenarios
4) Ignoring all other forcings (i.e. aerosols)
5) Screwing up the temperature plot (sorry no, in no data set I can find is 1998 hotter than 2005 in the 5-year running average).
Then having the balls to wrongly claim Hansen was off by 150%, and criticizing people who listen to Hansen when you make such a high density of errors yourself – wow. I’d be utterly embarrassed to have written this post.
[Moderator’s Note: It is not a good idea to use an e-mail address as a screen name, so I’ve taken the liberty of removing the identifying portion of your screen name. -REP]
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Applause for the site’s Mod Squad!
The world is made of four archetypes of human beings, Attila, the Witch Doctor, Ballast, and the Producer.
Ballast are those who “go through life in a state of unfocused stupor, merely repeating the words and the motions they learned from others.” (p. 200)
Attila rebels against reason by focusing on the physical means for survival. Specifically, Attila chooses to physically conquer those who choose to conquer nature. Attila tries to take by force the things that others produce. Attila bases his/her actions on sensations (urges, desires, aversions). Attila focuses on materialistic pleasures,those things that do not require much use of reason, specifically conceptions. Since the conceptual aspect of consciousness cannot be wholly neglected, Attila searches for something that gives his/her life meaning or a sense of being right. The Witch Doctor provides Attila with a code of values.
The Witch Doctor rebels against reason by attempting to conquer those who conquer the Producers. The Witch Doctor does not conquer Attila physically, but psychologically. The Witch Doctor rebels against reason by denying the ability to change nature. The Witch Doctor views the objects of sense as immutable. He/she believes that his/her feelings and senses can provide infallible knowledge of the universe. If reality clashes with what the Witch Doctor believes is true, then the Witch Doctor ignores reality. The Witch Doctor sets him/herself up as the authority on truth. This is how he/she conquers others, by convincing them that they ought to deny their own thoughts and ideas and blindly accept the Witch Doctor’s ideas as true. The Witch Doctor sets him/herself up as the authority on right and wrong.
While Attila focuses on the concrete and neglects abstraction, the Witch Doctor focuses on the abstract and neglects the concrete. Neither is adequate to deal with existence. So, the Witch Doctor and Attila become dependent upon each other. Together, they use fear and guilt to control the Ballast and undermine the Producers.
I think Hansen’s graph is extremely accurate. The problem for the AGW crowd is that it’s accurate for the C scenario only – no increase of CO2 from 2000 onwards. What it proves, quite strongly, is how insignificant the effect of man’s CO2 output really is.
What a few posters don’t seem to realize is that when predictions are made no one really cares about the details. You are either right or you are wrong. You’re a hero or you’re just another failure. In fact, one could say that all the assumptions are really predictions in and of themselves. So, bottom line is Hansen’s predictions were an epic fail. All the whining by apologists won’t change that fact.
dana1981 says:
June 15, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Thanks REP. As someone with an astrophysics degree myself,
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That would be your Bachelors degree?
dana1981 says:
June 15, 2012 at 1:57 pm
allow me to apologize on behalf of the astrophysics field for this absolutely amateurish error-riddled analysis by Solheim.
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Your apology would be better served if you and yours, apologized for Hansen….first.
Gras Albert: Again, CO2 forcing is logarithmic, a 10% rise represents around 18% rise in forcing from CO2 doubling,
Uh, send that by me one more time. I think maybe you should swap those two numbers.
KR says “Again, the various scenarios are “what-if”s, the actual model is how the climate would respond to various forcing levels.” And, you admit the forcing used was in correct, but that does not invalidate the model technique.
KR, correct me if I am wrong but what you are saying is that models are just what if scenarios and, the values inputed into them such as forcing levels are also what ifs.
So, the models can be “accurate” but since they are only “what-ifs” and many of the inputs are not really known, it should not be surpising that the models do not match the the observations. And, furthermore not surprising that they fail as predictors of future climate.
Me thinks, you are in violent argreement with most of the people commenting and with Anthony. Climate models are not accurate predictors of future climate. Guess you are a skeptic like me.
I would hate to see what would have happened, if we had actually halted CO2 emissions. According to their erroneous theory and the anticipated cooling effect of zero CO2, we would already be in a LIA.
Thank goodness we did nothing and we don’t need to evacuate Canada. Now can we have a refund on AGW measures considering CO2 seems to have zero actual effects to GMT. Hansen was just another religious prophet nutcase predicting the end is near. GK
Hansens estimate of temperatures were surprisingly good….
assuming CO2 has no effect on temperatures. 🙂
That seems to be his one litte mistake, poor old sod. !!
So, Jan-Erik Solheim claims that we should be above scenario A because CO2 emissions have been higher. But Hansen considered several GHGs and in reality total emissions have tracked below scenario B. Pretty clear error from Solheim there.
For apologist who try to argue that the 1988 model is “irrelevant” because the science has “moved on” note that from the latest issue of Nature, Professor Mark Maslin and Dr Patrick Austin claim (BTW, Patrick is from the UCL Environmental Change Research Centre and Mark from the Geology Department and are not sceptics) that:
“None of this means that climate models are useless….Their vision of the future has in some ways been incredibly stable. For example, the predicted rise in global temperature for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t changed much in more than 20 years.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7402/full/486183a.html
The standard rhetorical ploy is that climate models represent “applied physics” or “basic physics” so therefore in some unspecified sense contain a degree of infallibility. When it’s then pointed out that a particular model we can actually evaluate did a poor job, the response will be that the model is old and that the “science has moved on”. Apparently therefore “basic physics” has changed a lot since 1988. 😉