Reader Markx writes:
The title says it all here: “…Retrospective prediction…” indeed. How could a researcher keep a straight face and write such a title? (Maybe a subversive element at work?)
Retrospective prediction of the global warming slowdown in the past decade
Virginie Guemas, Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes, Isabel Andreu-Burillo
& Muhammad Asif
The Abstract:
Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period1. To explain such a pause, an increase in ocean heat uptake below the superficial ocean layer2, 3 has been proposed to overcompensate for the Earth’s heat storage. Contributions have also been suggested from the deep prolonged solar minimum4, the stratospheric water vapour5, the stratospheric6 and tropospheric aerosols7. However, a robust attribution of this warming slowdown has not been achievable up to now.
Here we show successful retrospective predictions of this warming slowdown up to 5 years ahead, the analysis of which allows us to attribute the onset of this slowdown to an increase in ocean heat uptake. Sensitivity experiments accounting only for the external radiative forcings do not reproduce the slowdown. The top-of-atmosphere net energy input remained in the [0.5–1] W m−2 interval during the past decade, which is successfully captured by our predictions.
Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 m of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65% of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown. The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal climate predictions.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1863.html
Meanwhile, reality continues to be a bitch:
Seems it wasn’t so long ago there was the phrase that “We can’t account for the warming ” unless we include the effects of CO2 in the models. Now that you CAGW people “apparently” have discovered a new natural phenomena not considered previously (ocean energy cycling) maybe it is time to go back and revisit the models and see if the late 20th century warming can INDEED be explained by almost entirely natural processes. While you guys are at it, maybe you can restore the MWP and LIA to the temperature records and quit pretending the Hockey stick represents reality.
On second thought, what was I thinking… please DON”T go back and include ocean cycling in your models… I am sure the result you guys will come up with is “ITS WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT”.
LOL, alcheson (“ITS WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT”), of course! #[:)]
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“… We search and search for the ‘missing gravity’, finally blaming the Moon for stealing the Earth’s gravity. Our model was correct after all. Whew!'” [Reg Nelson, 5/14/13 at 1519]
Great analogy, Reg Nelson. If I may, I’d like to “tune it” just a bit… .
[Given: Before they announce this, the current investors in Holy Cars, curly-fry light bulbs, and the like, sell off their inventory and re-tool their plant to produce pogo sticks.]
“… … finally blaming HUMAN BEINGS for stealing the Earth’s gravity. … .”
From then on, taxpayers will fund pogo st– er, I meant to say, “Anti-gravity Waste” [see, the same acronym can be used, to create confusion, in the midst of which the current AGW modellers can hide the fact that they were wrong about AGW, — to avoid having to answer the embarrassing question: “So, why should we believe you now?”] devices.
Mechanical engineers will get grants for how to make a better pog-, er, AGW device. Physicists will get grants to prove how well the AGW devices are doing at saving the gravity of the planet, etc… etc… .
The serfs won’t be able to do much work after commuting 15 miles (or even 1) on their pogo sticks, so, the engineers will come up with a nifty two-stroke engine-powered model. That will be too noisy, so a 4-stroke will come in (battery power — ARE YOU KIDDING? — oh, yeah, that may be where Bloomberg and his fat police come in, to be sure people are so skinny that the pogo-stick can lift the battery that powers it long enough to get more than one block down the street). THEN, there will be nifty exhaust systems and padded handles and seats and stereos and….
The title of the paper is incorrect. The word they are looking for is “Postdiction.” /yes yes sarc
“So long as scientists tow the progressive line”
“Toe the line” is correct. As any literate person knows, the idiom means “to stand with ones toes on a line”. Several origins have been suggested for the phrase. The most probable seems to be from the Royal Navy in the days when barefoot sailors assembled on deck.
And there is nothing progressive about dishonesty.
Janice Moore says:
“… … finally blaming HUMAN BEINGS for stealing the Earth’s gravity. … .”
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Our grandchildren will never know what a falling apple or a falling star looks like. And countless species will become extinct as they are flung out into space.
Reg @ur momisugly 5:45PM. LOL.
Steven Mosher says: May 14, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Hmm. I don’t see anyone claiming they predicted this all along.
Skeptics screeching that the models are falsified and the climerati claiming that they are validated.
I think it is all about how well ‘climerati’ (geez… what does that mean … gotta go with CAGW proponents) understand what is happening,
and the answer to that would clearly appear to be “Not nearly as well as they said they did!”
And… “Skeptics screeching” ….. “climerati claiming” … (hmmm, a nasty bias on Mosher’s part? …. or just showing a hitherto invisible poetic streak? )
Reg Nelson says:
May 14, 2013 at 5:45 pm
…Stealing gravity …
“… And countless species will become extinct as they are flung out into space…”
It’s worse than we thought!
Do you realize with about 100,000,000 species on earth, if only 0.01% of these are flung into space each year that will be 10,000 species lost per year!
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/
It’s simple. They copied us in advance.
@Steven Mosher: They guess that the heat is in the oceans and call it a day. Your car stopping analogy is over sophomoric.
Could it be that the brake pads faded more than expected? Or brakes were incorrectly sized? Perhaps they incorrectly factored in for wind friction at higher speeds? Or maybe the tire temperatures did not provide the grip they had expected? Or perhaps they were trying to stop on tarmac which had a different texture than their model?
Climate science is more complex than stopping a car, and they are just guessing by plugging in some other “fudge factor” to prove they must have been correct because now climate can now be predicted based on everything they already knew plus the one missing variable.
I sure hope that somewhere , the original recorded data is being safely stored for the future when these ‘scientific’ charlatans can be brought to account and the temperature record of the Earth can be returned to a ‘common set of numbers’.
Here we show successful retrospective predictions of this warming slowdown up to 5 years ahead…
“retrospective predictions”!!!
I guess what these bozos mean is that hindsight is 20/20.
And they expect us to take climate psience seriously!
Mosher
Those are good questions, but they have little to do with my point. my point is simple. these guys are doing what everybody else in the field does to improve a model. Build a model, make predictions. find your mistakes, change the model, re run, find the problems, fix the model, re run. find the problems, fix the model…
You didn’t get the point Mosher. This is not what everybody does. And actually it is what everybody tries to avoid because we learned about epicycles and luminiferous ether hundreds of years ago.
You probably never did theoretical physics what can be translated as “building models”.
When you build epicycles and the model fails, you will try to improve it aka add new hypothesis and/or free parameters.
But, and this is the real point, the physicists learned that this process may be done ONLY a few times but not over and over as you suggested.
Indeed if you have to do it too often, it is a sure sign that what you are doing are actually epicycles.
And then what a real scientist does is to ABANDON the model because he realizes that the probability that it is incorrect is simply too high.
What did these guys do? They realized that the models they have been developping for the last 30 years and that devoured billions have completely missed the internal oceanic heat transfer. Even you have to agree that this is a major paradigmatic failure – not just some minor parameter adjustment. If you get the oceanic heat transfer wrong, what can you get right ?
Yet up to 2006 or so, the word was that the models projections (aka ensemble averages) were “robust”. How could it have been “robust” if the major process, of oceanic heat transfer, was not ?
The prevailing paradigm still today (and this paper is no exception) is that “climate is not weather”, e.g the former is deterministic even if the latter is chaotic.
The competing paradigm (see f.ex Tsonis et al) is that “climate is weather”, e.g chaotic.
Already 10 years ago there was an interesting thread by Gerald Browning on Climate Audit about “exponential divergence” which argued that the climate models dramatically failed and had to fail when confronted with the chaotic behaviour of the fluid dynamics.
Now the writing is on the wall – the body of evidence is growing that the climate is chaotic and the materialisation of the chaotic behaviour which are the oceanic oscillations at all time scales is what governs the climate.
But if that is true and it is my conviction, then it is really about time to throw the models out.
for if the climate (via oceanic oscillations) is chaotic then it is NOT predictable. The only hope of climate science would be then to try to find the probability distribution of future states if it is invariant what is far from certain. A whole new physics (non linear dynamics applied to climate) would have to be developped for that and if it doesn’t happen soon, we will just discover over and over new “unexpected events” which will have to be “retropredicted” in order to fix the epicycles which will go on failing again a bit later.
This doesn’t look like science to me like to the majority of posters here.
Re. Bob says:
May 14, 2013 at 11:27 am
Re. your point 2.
I think many are looking at this incorrectly. The deep ocean has shown large scale continued warming during the pause.
The paper from Levitus shows the scale of eh warming since 1955 at 24.0 +/- 1.9 x 10^22
With a negative PDO sinking heat, plus increased evaporative cooling and MOC state… these are a reasonably clear indicator as to why there is a pause in the surface warming.
I think many people are looking in the wrong direction.
Natural variation is clearly important, but that does not change the steady increase in heat energy accumulation.
Re. your point 3.
Very good point. I would like to see how the NAS explains the little ice age as well as the fact that CO2 in the paleo record increases after warming occurs.
Re. your point 4.
Again an excellent point. Why don’t they address this? If they are going to make videos about climate, they should get into more detail.
I’m not sure it qualifies as a straw man, but I agree that they (NAS) are not addressing skeptical concerns.
I noticed they also have a booklet that came out with the movie. I will have to read more in the booklet to see if they address any of these issues.
http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/new-resources-about-climate-change/
Steven Mosher says:
May 14, 2013 at 12:28 pm
But to be fair these guys are doing nothing different than anybody else who works with complex models.
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Every computer model has two inputs. The data and the model builders. When model builders ignore the fact that they are one of the inputs, they fall victim to the one of the most basic of model building fallacies.
The problem with computer models is that they are much better at predicting what the model builders expect to see than they are at predicting the future. This ability of models is what makes them so seductive to model builders. The model builders develop great faith in their models because the models are so powerful at showing the model builders exactly what they expect to see. Models are the ultimate “yes men” – they tell you exactly what you want to hear.
Thus, one of the most basic steps in building a model is to independently test it using data that is hidden from both the model builders and the model. If the model can predict the missing data, then it may have predictive power, or it may have gotten the right answer by chance. However, if it cannot predict the missing data, then it has no skill. At no time is it valid to test the model using data that is known to the model builders, because of the very strong ability of the models to correctly predict what the model builders expect.
What the divergence over the last 15 years has shown is that the models have no skill at predicting hidden data when that data is also unknown to the model builders. To look at data after the fact, when it is known to the modellers is no test. It is worse than no test. It is a false and misleading test. The model builders are simply fooling themselves.
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Steven Mosher says:
May 14, 2013 at 8:02 am
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False analogy. If what you say were correct, the earth’s avg surface temp would be close to the avg temp of the ocean volume — 5C or so.
Fail.
I see Julia is still in the news – at the Met office’s latest newsletter.
In climatology, “predict” is a polysemic term, that is, a term with more than one meaning. When an argument employs one or more polysemic terms, as is the case here, its conclusions are logically improper.
TomVonk says:
May 15, 2013 at 2:40 am
Now the writing is on the wall – the body of evidence is growing that the climate is chaotic and the materialisation of the chaotic behaviour which are the oceanic oscillations at all time scales is what governs the climate.
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The underlying assumption in ensemble climate models is that the Climate, specifically global temperature, is subject to the Law of Large Numbers. However, this a fallacy that has never been demonstrated to be true.
For the Law of Large Numbers to apply to global temperature, there must exists a global “mean” temperature around which temperatures will converge. However, it is clear that there is no global mean temperature. Temperatures have generally been falling for the past 8000 years with brief periods of warming every 1000-2000 years. Prior to that temperatures were much lower for tens of thousands of years.
Expecting an ensemble of models to converge on an answer that does not exists is mathematical nonsense. Add to this, the Law of Large Numbers also expects a constant variance. However, when one looks at temperature records it is clear that there is no constant variance. As the scale increases, so does the variance, which strongly argues that climate is a fractal distribution. The larger the time slice, the greater the swings in temperature one sees.
It is well known that fractal distributions do not converge. You cannot average them and expect the Law of Large Numbers to hold. Yet climate modellers continue to build fantasy upon fantasy, having neglected to apply the most basic of statistical tests to their data to determine beforehand if it is suitable for modelling.
Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period
And S= UT + 1/10 A T squared After all it give the right answer after a pause.
If Harris is serious about CO2 saving the planet from freezing solid, he must be desperate to maintain and increase it.
@ferdberple says:
May 15, 2013 at 5:42 am
Your posts are terrific. Take this as a “like”
The article is an admission that temperature is not a good proxy for energy balance in the Earth Sun system. Need more proof? Read the article again. What else does it mean? Temperature is a political proxy for climate balance. Need more proof? Read the article again. What else it means is the pro-big green movement is willing to say and invoke anything real or imagined to push their agenda. Need more proof?