Guest post by Dr. Tim Ball
In a comment on the WUWT article about the abject failure of UKMO weather forecasts, “Slingo Pretends She Knows Why It’s Been So Wet!”, Doug Huffman wrote, “Each forecast must be accompanied by the appropriate retro-cast record of previous casts” (January 6, 2013 at 7:06 am). I pointed out years ago that Environment Canada (EC) publishes such information. They expose a similar horrendous story of absolute failure. This likely indicates why it is not done by others, but provides adequate justification for significantly reducing the role of the agency.
Both EC and UKMO predictions fail. The failure parallels Richard Feynman’s comment.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
If your prediction (forecast) is wrong; your science is wrong. Unlike the IPCC, they cannot avoid the problem by calling them projections, not predictions. They can and do avoid accountability.
Initially I thought EC was admirable for publishing results. Now I realize it only shows arrogance and sense of unaccountability: we fail, but you must listen, act, and keep paying. It underscores the hypocrisy of what they do. More important, it shows why they and all national weather agencies must be proscribed. It is time to reduce all national weather offices to data collection agencies. When bureaucrats do research it is political by default. The objective rapidly becomes job preservation; perpetuate and expand rather than solve the problem.
EC is a prime example of why Maurice Strong set up the IPCC through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and member national weather agencies. EC participated and actively promoted the failed work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from the start. An Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM) of EC chaired the founding meeting of the IPCC in Villach Austria in 1985. It continues, as they sent a large delegation to the recent Doha conference on climate change. Their web site promotes IPCC work as the basis for all policy on energy and environment. They brag about their role as a world class regulator. All this despite the fact their own evidence shows the complete inadequacy of their work.
They display their failures on maps. Pick any map or period and it shows how a coin toss would achieve better or at least comparable results. Here is their caption for the maps.
” The upper panel shows the seasonal air temperature or precipitation anomaly forecasts. The forecast are presented in 3 categories: below normal, near normal and above normal. The lower panel illustrates the skill (percent correct) associated to the forecast.”
The maps are for temperature and precipitation for 12, 6 and 1-3 months.
Everyone knows that regional weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable, especially beyond 48 hours. This fact weakened the credibility of the IPCC predictions with the public from the start. Some supporters of the IPCC position tried to counteract the problem by saying that climate forecasts were different from weather forecasts. It is a false argument. Climate is the average of the weather, so if the weather science is wrong the climate science is wrong.
Some experts acknowledge that regional climate forecasts are no better than short term weather forecasts. New Scientist reports that Tim Palmer, a leading climate modeler at the European Centre for Medium – Range Weather Forecasts in Reading England saying, “I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain.” In an attempt to claim some benefit, we’re told, “…he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change. But he and his fellow climate scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC’s predictions of how the global change will affect local climates are little more than guesswork. The IPCC have deliberately misled the world about the nature, cause and threat of climate change and deceived about the accuracy of their predictions (projections), for a political agenda.
Some claim the failures are due to limited computer capacity. It makes no difference. The real problems are inadequate data, lack of understanding of most major mechanisms, incorrect assumptions, and a determination to prove instead of falsify the AGW hypothesis.
Einstein’s definition, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” applies. However, EC do the same thing over and over with results that indicate failure yet fail to make adjustments as the scientific method requires. What is more amazing and unacceptable is they use public money, are essentially unaccountable yet demand the public and politicians change their energy and economic policies. On their web site, they state; “The Government of Canada supports an aggressive approach to climate change that achieves real environmental and economic benefits for all Canadians.” They could begin by reducing EC to data collection. Their failures are more than enough to justify termination in any other endeavour. Another is their involvement and political promotion of well documented IPCC corruption.
joeldshore:
You begin your silly post at January 11, 2013 at 5:46 pm saying
Yes, Richard Telford did make that fallacious assertion and I demolished it in my rebuttal at January 8, 2013 at 4:32 am. I concluded that rebuttal saying
At January 8, 2013 at 5:49 am, Telford mentioned my rebuttal but evaded any discussion and/or refutation of it.
At January 8, 2013 at 2:48 pm, Telford repeated his untrue – and plain wrong – assertion, so at January 9, 2013 at 3:41 am I reminded him of my rebuttal.
Since then ,you and Telford have not made any attempt to discuss the reason why Telford’s assertion is plain wrong. But your post tries to pretend he is right despite the post from Frank K (at January 11, 2013 at 2:41 pm) which details why Telford’s assertion is plain wrong.
Your post concludes saying
I know you like to proclaim things you know to be plain wrong because you do it so often. In this case – as so often in the past – you are completely wrong and everybody can see you know you are wrong. In reality
1.
Telford was completely wrong.
2.
I explained how and why Telford was completely wrong.
3.
You and Telford have not addressed his being completely wrong.
4.
It is not a knit-pick to point out that Telford was completely wrong.
5.
Ball made true and undeniable statements: n.b. not and “argument”.
Richard
joeldshore:
At January 12, 2013 at 8:37 am you ask mpainter:
Easy, each climate model uses a unique but grossly high climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 and balances that to force its hindcasts to fit twentieth century global warming by using a unique cooling from aerosol.
See
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8167/kiehl2007figure2.png
Please note that the Figure is for 9 GCMs and 2 energy balance models, and its title is:
”Figure 2. Total anthropogenic forcing (Wm2) versus aerosol forcing (Wm2) from nine fully coupled climate models and two energy balance models used to simulate the 20th century.”
It is from
Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007
Richard
joeldshore says:
January 12, 2013 at 8:37 am
I did not say that there is no theory of AGW…
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joeldshore says:
January 11, 2013 at 12:01 pm
There is no special “AGW theory” to incorporate into the climate models.
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So then, do we finally agree that there is what is called the Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, aka AGW?
Do we agree that AGW theory involves radiation physics and the greenhouse effect? and that the various aspects of AGW theory involve an increase of atm humidity and multiplication by that of the incremental CO2 effect, i.e., positive feedback? There is more to it, but you get the idea, I am sure.
I say that climate models elaborate the above mentioned aspects of AGW theory, incorporating it as algorithms. You seem to disagree. What climate modeler would agree with you?
======================================================
Joel Shore says: “Your claim is that for all ~20 major climate models that are out there, AGW theory is somehow put into them rather than that support for it emerges from them.”
====================================================
Yes, that is my essential claim: climate models incorporate AGW theory and then the product of these models is presented as confirmation of AGW theory. I say that is the fallacy of circular reasoning.
mpainter
mpainter: By your reasoning, any modeling to understand how our universe works would be circular (including my example about chaos). You simply define all of the science, no matter how well-understood and verified, that goes into the modeling as being part of the theory that comes out…and, viola…You have circular reasoning.
It is not circular reasoning just because the well-understood physical laws about the propagation of radiation in the atmosphere is one of the ingredients that leads to the prediction of AGW. It is not circular reasoning just because modeling of the transport of water vapor in the atmosphere predicts that a warmer atmosphere has a higher (absolute) humidity and this is one of the ingredients in the prediction of AGW.
We model the atmosphere with the physics we know. We don’t just ignore that physics because it leads to results that are ideologically inconvenient to some.
Joel Shore: You seem as a cat chasing its tail. All support you offer to AGW is AGW restated i.e., the theorems of physics that constitute AGW theory.
“no matter how well-understood and verified” This is hardly the case- in fact it is a contentious and disputed area. The so-called “climate sensitivity” factors vary from model to model and it is disputed from modeler to modeler. Everything is in dispute: feedbacks, saturation curves, clouds, etc.
And here you come and say that the product of the models verifies AGW theory, and that is not circular. Perhaps you can believe that it fails to convince.
There is a well known type; the theoretical physicist that has nothing to do with observations, never has, cannot incorporate observations into his thinking because theory is supreme and observations subordinate.
mpainter
mpainter says:
Of the things that you mention, the only one that is seriously in dispute in the scientific community is the value of the cloud feedback. And, yes, this leads to uncertainty about the climate sensitivity. But, that doesn’t mean that we know nothing about climate sensitivity. And, it also doesn’t mean that the models represent circular reasoning.
There is also another well-known type: The person whose evaluation of scientific evidence tends to reach conclusions that just happen to agree with their ideological preconceptions. (And, in fact, studies show that MOST people do this when they are not experts in the field that they are looking at.)
The basic physics that underlies the climate models is well-verified experimentally. We have an entire practical field of science and technology (“remote sensing”) based on radiative transfer in the atmosphere. (Ironically, some people who dispute this basic radiative physics nonetheless trust the UAH temperature data set that is fundamentally based on it!) We have satellite and radiosonde data that strongly support the basic idea and the magnitude of the water vapor feedback, i.e., how the atmosphere moistens with increasing temperature.
While the cloud feedback remains a significant source of uncertainty in the models, none of the modeling groups nor any of the “AGW skeptics” (who have access to several open source climate models) have been able to produce a parametrization of clouds that is physically reasonable and leads to a low sensitivity (below about 1.5 to 2 C per CO2 doubling). [I find it particularly interesting that none of those who claim that the cloud feedback is a significant negative feedback have been able to demonstrate that there is even a way to produce such a feedback in the climate models using any sort of physically-reasonable parametrization of clouds.]
Furthermore, the empirical evidence, including paleoclimate data (like the last glacial maximum), response to volcanic eruptions (like Mt Pinatubo), the instrumental temperature record, and the seasonal cycle provide evidence for a significant climate sensitivity (likely greater than 2 C and very likely greater than 1.5 C per CO2 doubling).
richardscourtney says:
No, you didn’t. Your rebuttal made an incorrect assumption that “the science of weather is wrong”. However, our understanding of chaos does not tell us that the science of weather is wrong. What it tells us is that the weather is inherently very sensitive to initial conditions so that even if you have the correct equations, you still cannot predict that far out into the future because of uncertainties in initial conditions. And, that same science of chaos tells us that although such weather predictions will fail, the equations will still produce weather with the right statistical properties.
And, in fact, numerical weather prediction these days is quite impressive, as was pointed out here in a recent post about how accurately the path of Sandy was predicted even 4 to 5 days in advance. And, the models are run in “ensembles” with slightly different initial conditions in order to tell the forecasters to what degrees the predictions are sensitive to this particular source of uncertainty.
The statements by Frank K that you quote in that post don’t relate to Telford’s assertion. Instead, they attack a “strawman” argument, basically an argument that there are no uncertainties in predicting future global warming. That is an argument that nobody was making and is unrelated to the point about whether or not the inherent sensitivity to initial conditions makes prediction of future climate due to a significant change in radiative forcing impossible.
Science is essentially about understanding universe in the face of the complications and uncertainties that always exist. Part of this is carefully identifying and quantifying these uncertainties. It is not helped by people making up uncertainties that don’t exist.
Joel Shore:
I assume that we agree that there is a theory of anthropogenic global warming, aka AGW,
and that GCM’s incorporate that theory as algorithms. Please correct me if this is not so.
joeldshore:
At January 13, 2013 at 7:05 am you use your usual fallback position when cornered in a discussion, and you provide a blatant falsehood: viz.
Bollocks!
At January 12, 2013 at 1:33 pm I informed you – with link and reference – that
(a) each climate model uses a different value for “Total anthropogenic forcing” that is in the range 0.80 W/m^-2 to 2.02 W/m^-2
and
(b) each model is forced to agree with the rate of past warming by using a different value for “Aerosol forcing” that is in the range -1.42 W/m^-2 to -0.60 W/m^-2.
In other words the models use values of “Total anthropogenic forcing” that differ by a factor of more than 2.5 and they are ‘adjusted’ by using values of assumed “Aerosol forcing” that differ by a factor of 2.4.
“Neither of those parameters is “cloud feedback”.
Richard
mpainter:
I have already explained in my previous posts to you what my position is: What the models incorporate into them are the physics of the atmosphere, oceans, radiation, … as we currently understand them. They are not circular reasoning.
Now, you might object to certain particular elements of physics that are in the models, but then it is up to you to explain what your objections are and to provide evidence that the models are incorrect in their physical description of this process and that this lack of correctness has (or is likely to have) a significant effect on the basic predictions made by the models (such as the equilibrium climate sensitivity).
Richard: The sentence that you quote from me was a response to the list that mpainter presented, as is clear in the first part of my sentence that you failed to quote: “Of the things that you mention…”
I agree that the total radiative forcing of aerosols still has a large uncertainty…and this uncertainty is the main reason why the instrumental temperature record alone does not provide a very good constraint on the equilibrium climate sensitivity or transient climate response. However, this uncertainty in aerosol forcing is unlikely to have a significant direct impact on predictions of future climate because, unless we want to either choke ourselves with pollution (or try some risky geoengineering scheme where we continuously inject aerosols into the stratosphere), the accumulating effect of the non-condensable greenhouse gases dominates the temperature response. It just makes it more difficult to determine from the instrumental temperature record which of the range of possible climate sensitivities is the most realistic, which means that models with a fairly large range of climate sensitivities and aerosol forcings can all do a reasonable job of simulating the instrumental temperature record.
joeldshore:
Your posts at January 13, 2013 at 10:07 am and January 13, 2013 at 11:58 am is each a classic fail.
re your post at January 13, 2013 at 10:07 am
I made no “assumption” in my rebuttal of Telford’s nonsense. Tim Ball said “if the science of weather is wrong the climate science is wrong.” In the context of defining boundary conditions for climate there is no known “science of weather”. Weather is a chaotic system with unknown strange attractors and unknown chaotic equations. This lack of knowledge means it is not possible to define the boundary conditions of the system. Hence, any definition of boundary conditions is ‘wrong science’ because the definition is any one of an infinite number of guesses.
re your post at January 13, 2013 at 11:58 am
You claim you said other than you did. The context was – and is – clear. You claimed “cloud feedback” is the only parameter in the climate models which is “in serious dispute”. That is not true and you knew it is not true because I had told you – with link and reference – it is not true.
You were and are wrong on both issues. You should ‘man up’ and admit you were wrong on both issues, but I anticipate you will wriggle as you usually do when you are shown to be wrong.
Richard
Joel Shore, a hard-core Green spouts dogma while pretending science. The modelers all confirm that the models essentially incorporate AGW theory. Maybe you are fooling yourself, but I do not see how .
richardscourtney says:
Frankly, this is nonsense. The equations are not “unknown” except in the sence that one can say the equations governing anything are unknown. After all, the equations of gravity are unknown since we know that the current picture of gravity is not compatible with quantum mechanics. And, yes, it is possible to define the boundary conditions, which are things like the concentration of various greenhouse gases (at least in models that don’t have their own carbon cycle; if they do, then one defines emissions and it computes the concentration). There may be uncertainties in certain boundary conditions (such as solar forcing and volcanic eruptions) but, barring the sun doing something extremely dramatic or there being a super-eruption of the kind experienced only very rarely in every given century, these effects will be small compared to the effect of greenhouse gases. And, do you think this would be the first boundary-value problem in the history of science where the boundary conditions are not known with infinite precision?
Richard, when you originally deleted the first part of the sentence that I had written as “Of the things that you mention, the only one that is seriously in dispute in the scientific community is the value of the cloud feedback,” I tried to interpret it as just an honest mistake on your part. Now that you are continuing to press the point, it is hard not to consider it as an indicative of intentional dishonesty.
At any rate, I have explained why the uncertainty in aerosol forcing is not that important to future predictions except in the sense that it makes it more difficult to narrow down the climate sensitivity (which, in an indirect way, means the cloud feedback) using the instrumental temperature record.
mpainter says:
I assume that you have a quote to that effect, presumably in a statement that says it in a way that they mean it in the same way that you do…i.e., that it is just an exercise in circular reasoning? I would be quite surprised to see a modeler claim that.
Not all modelers are greenies. Are you surprised?