This is something I never expected to see in print. Climate modeler Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS comments on the failure of models to match real world observations.
Source:
[ http://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/340605947883962368 ]
While the discussion was about social models, it is also germane to climate modeling since they too don’t match real world observations. Below is an example of climate models -vs- the real world; something’s clearly not right.
Graph source: IPCC AR5 draft
Is it maths or assumptions (or both) that cause the divergence?
UPDATE: In comments, I had a discussion with reader “jfk” which I think is worth sharing. He made some good points, and it helped hone my own thinking on the issue:
jfk says: Submitted on 2013/06/01 at 8:40 am
Well, I still think it’s a bit unfair to Gavin (and I am no fan of his). But hey, it’s Anthony’s site.
For a good review of the many failures of statistical modeling in social sciences (and one or two successes) see the book “Statistical Models: Theory and Practice” by David Freedman. Whether or not climate modeling has devolved to the point where it is social science rather than physics, well, I hope it’s not quite that bad…
REPLY: And I think it is more than a bit unfair to us, that if he believes what he tweets, he should re-examine his own assumptions about climate modeling. We have economies, taxes, livelihood, etc. hinging (or perhaps failing) on the success of these models to predict the climate in the future. The models aren’t working, and Dr. Schmidt knows this. Unfortunately his job is tied to the idea that they do in fact work. I feel no regrets at making this comparison front and center. – Anthony
UPDATE2: RussR in comments, provides this graph below showing Hansen’s modeled scenarios against real world observations. He writes:
Here’s an excel spreadsheet comparing observed temperatures vs. model projection from: Hansen (1988), IPCC FAR (1990), IPCC SAR (1995) and IPCC TAR (2001), in pretty charts.
It can be updated as more observations are added.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78507292/Climate%20Models.xlsx
UPDATE3: Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. adds this in comments.
Climate models are engineering code with quite a few tunable parameters, and fitting functions in their parameterization of clouds, precipitation, land-atmospheric interfacial fluxes, long- and short-wave radiative flux divergences, etc. Only a part of these models are basic physics representations – the pressure gradient force, advection, the Coriolis effect.
The tunable parameters and fitting functions are developed by adjustment from real world data and a higher resolution models (which themselves are engineering code), but only for a quite small subset of real world conditions.
I discuss this issue in depth in my book
Pielke Sr, R.A., 2013: Mesoscale meteorological modeling. 3rd Edition, Academic Press, in press. http://www.amazon.com/Mesoscale-Meteorological-Modeling-International-Geophysics/dp/0123852374/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1370191013&sr=8-2&keywords=mesoscale+meteorological+modeling
The multi-decadal global climate model projections, when run in a hindcast mode for the last several decades are showing very substantial errors, as I summarize in the article
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/b-18preface.pdf
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@ur momisugly Berényi Péter says:
June 1, 2013 at 4:09 pm
A thoughtful post, aiming to deal the the nub of the matter, or at least that part which is reflected in the processes that claim to justify these models as having a legitimacy based on reality.
Virtually all commentary on this issue concerns itself – when looking at the “science” or “technical” aspects – with what is essentially nit-picking. This may be understandable, and may have been a necessary response, at least from some, in past years. However, as is always the case when fundamentals are overlooked or assumed by participants in such an area of contention, which is depressingly normal as perspectives are suborned and subsumed by the course dictated by the dominant proponents of anything, simple understandings which underpin the entire edifice, and which, if looked at properly, render all the noise and fury moot, lose their essential place.
It is obvious, and has always been obvious, that this issue has no intellectual underpinnings that justify a public policy response. This has nothing to do with science; it is about a (moderate) application of intelligence and the obligation to recognize the results of that.
The precise nature of what has happened to “science” which independently of public policy response has plainly failed to the point of non-existence, must be seen and known.
I think your distinction – almost a definition – between science and psuedo-science as being in effect related to the nature of intent, and the cultural context in which this occurs, is interesting.
It is clear that, not just in science, human undertakings developed over centuries which require and reflect certain sensibilities, practices, and disciplines, have been comprehensively polluted.
Without addressing these things at a foundational level, which cannot be done without reviewing the basic principles and identifying where, how, and why they have been perverted, nothing can be done, regardless of who or what “wins” in any one issue including this.
Your delineation between scientists and modellers as being in fact antithetical is – like most things that go to the bone – simply and convincingly put. There will be of course many who will argue that such a distinction cannot be made with such certainty, and will claim a legitimate synthesis born of necessity, utility, and superior evolution of understanding. I very much doubt that away from all the noise such people might make, they would be able to justify this on first principles.
In any case this is the level things really depend on, and this is the level that has failed. This approach is the only way to retrieve reality and meaning.
You didn’t point out the really interesting thing about this twitter exchange — the other party was Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan”! In other words, one of the contemporary deities in the world of catastrophe statistics or predictive modeling of highly nonlinear systems on the (stupid, stupid, stupid) basis of presumed linearity and Gaussian constraint to some sort of “normal” behavior. No wonder Schmidt was being deferential — Taleb would eat him alive if they went head to head, and in all probability was eating him alive in this exchange.
Taleb, of all people alive, knows the stupidity of pretending we know enough to model an enormously nonlinear system with unknown feedbacks and multiple attractors and parametric variables with a simple one-parameter linearized model. It doesn’t work for the market, and it doesn’t work for climate science either. It is news to me that he’s taking an interest in the climate issue — quite possibly bad news from the point of of the promoters of oversimplified models that fail even in the quite short run.
rgb
John F. Hultquist asks:
“So, what were they tweeting about? Is there a ‘social model’ gone wrong…”
Robin says:
“I just finished reading the UN’s Post-2015 plans for all of us … They are using climate change literally as the basis for remaking societies, economies, and new mindsets and values.”
Hopefully the UN is not using social modeling to determine how best to corral the world’s sheeple into obeisance to the First Church of Climatology.
Volcano Sun ENSO 9 year 11 year tips …
1. http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/2314/sunspotsvei.png (new)
2. http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/8272/sjev911.png
3. http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/2836/volcano911.png
Gavin disappoints.
Sorry. No-one had said it.
Drat – it had been said. Sunday head on – my only excuse. (hang-dog face)
As G. Schmidt obviously still believes, chaos can be filtered out over a long timescale like “noise”, he could have learned from these two excellent posts/papers, that it’s the Lyapunov-exponent problem he’s dealing with! (WUWT.com/2011/06/13/the-chaos-theoretic-argument-that-undermines-climate-change-modelling)and (drroyspencer.com/2009/03/weather-chaos-and-climate-change)
The fact about “models” he and all of the CAGW-adepts must accept is : – antsh.. in, – bullsh.. out!
Perhaps Niels Bohr’s apercu will comfort Dr. Schmidt :”Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future!”
The entire purpose of the Scientific Method is to get a reality check on our assumptions about how the universe works. Only Reality can sign that check.
Gavin Schmidt is the mouthpiece for a working consortium of funds scamming frauds who had their work surprisingly highlighted by Al Gore in his comeback tour after losing the election.
When the searchlight came onto what they were doing and came apart Big Al just kept upping the ante declaring George Bush the man he lost to, a terrorist: financing terrorists who got their money from oil proceeds.
Gavin Schmidt and Englishman Phil Jones were involved with the weather scam,
Al Gore’s financial partners with whom he scammed the Carbon Sin Forgiveness Certificates
were in Germany.
Oddly enough, the MAIN group of people who NEVER BOUGHT Al Gore’s end-of-the-world story
were Creationists.
The entire rest of the world went along with it declaring it “flat earth” to not admit it – while the men modeling Green House Gases laughed among themselves because their Stefan – Boltzmann mathematics pertains to a FLAT circle: the earth, as flat.
The entire scam is massive political crime, from Hansen to Gore himself, to Schmidt and Mann and Jones, to Trenberth with his “Wow, there’s more heat coming out, than going in”
“budget” of energy for the earth, drawn up while he was high on who-knows what.
No one has any regard for a pure sycophant lackey. Only people looking for a reason to further the lackey’s story have anything to do with them.
Gore, Hansen, Schmidt, Trenberth, tried to take a frigid nitrogen bath with a shot of water added, as a phase change refrigeration component of the cooling
that had a warm solid rock at the bottom of it, swirling submerged in it at a thousand miles per hour
into a big warm blankie, that was going to get ever hotter until the end of the world.
Unless we all just went ahead and installed Al Gore’s energy policies in spite of the election.
So Big Al could jack up the price of the Alternative Energy stocks his dad had left him, in oil/alternative energy giant, ‘Occidental Oil.’
———-
Then as one last insult Al Gore sold his cable company to Al Jazeera: the corporate property of the Oil Baron Royalty of Oman.
Just to let you guys know that if you don’t mobilize the media for Al,
he won’t be bothered to mobilize the media, for you.
Oil financed terror or not.
That’s who Gavin Schmidt is: the gum on the heel of the shoe, of the heel of the story.
A sycophant nobody whose sole claim to notoriety is as the mouthpiece for the biggest energy markets scam in 75 years.
Although I think it looks ridiculous and silly, I do understand that residents of some other countries for whatever reason have taken to pluralizing a dual-purpose world like “math” to “maths”. But what is Gavin’s excuse as he is an American and is based in NYC? I grew up there and I do not remember ever seeing that “word” taught to or used by anyone.
This is the twitterizing devolution of a very simple language. The word he was looking for was “mathematics”. And yes, this is giving that twit a giant pass on the rest of the grammar in that tweet.
Hi Anthony – Climate models are engineering code with quite a few tunable parameters, and fitting functions in their parameterization of clouds, precipitation, land-atmospheric interfacial fluxes, long- and short-wave radiative flux divergences, etc. Only a part of these models are basic physics representations – the pressure gradient force, advection, the Coriolis effect.
The tunable parameters and fitting functions are developed by adjustment from real world data and a higher resolution models (which themselves are engineering code), but only for a quite small subset of real world conditions.
I discuss this issue in depth in my book
Pielke Sr, R.A., 2013: Mesoscale meteorological modeling. 3rd Edition, Academic Press, in press. http://www.amazon.com/Mesoscale-Meteorological-Modeling-International-Geophysics/dp/0123852374/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1370191013&sr=8-2&keywords=mesoscale+meteorological+modeling
The multi-decadal global climate model projections, when run in a hindcast mode for the last several decades are showing very substantial errors, as I summarize in the article
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/b-18preface.pdf
Thanks Dr. Pielke, I’ll add this reference.
This admission by Gavin will break the hearts of all the David Appells.
So sad.
Roger A. Pielke Sr. says:
June 2, 2013 at 9:39 am
Two questions then please:
1. Do these models actually represent the real earth: as a globe with sunlight varying by latitude, season, and day-of-year? With albedo and clouds varying annually and with oceans and land boundaries accurate?
or are they Trenberth’s “flat earth” model – a half-disk perpetually bathed in sunlight at at an “average earth” with no oceans, lands, and only average albedos?
2. Have any models been run from 1850 through today’s conditions with 160 years of actual volcanic and aerosol levels? Or do they all begin at 1995 and become worthless (to 97% inaccuracy) within 20 years?
Blade says:
June 2, 2013 at 9:33 am
———————————–
Gavin is British. Americans, as you know, say “math”, but the British “maths” because it’s short for “mathematics”.
Given that Gavin has lived in the US for so long & ostensibly works for the American taxpayer, his continued use of British English suggests he thinks that “maths” is correct & that 300 million benighted colonials are wrong. In fact, both uses are acceptable.
commieBob says:
June 1, 2013 at 6:52 pm
” Anything we do, or don’t do, will change the planet.
———————————————————————–
By coincidence, I learned that little fact at the tender age of 6, and I remember that lesson to this day. It all started with the Great Flood of 1955/56 in the Pacific Northwest. Being as young as I was, I do not recall the storm itself. It was the aftermath that made me aware of ‘change’ in the natural world. My birthday is at the end of May. In 1956 I turned 6 years old. Every year our parents would take us camping several times to Samuel P Taylor Redwood Park in Marin County. Lagunitis Creek runs through there. A beautiful creek, which in the 50s still had good fishing. Being that this was redwood country, there were some awesome huge stump ‘forts’ for the kids to play in. Prior to this year, my mom wouldn’t trust me to run with the older boys, as I was a bit small. The older boys would have wars in their forts and throw redwood cones, sticks, and small rocks at one another. I had been told that I would have to grow a bit first, so here I was old enough to run with the older boys. Except that the 2 finest forts had been destroyed by the flood from the 55/56 winter. Believe me that struck a note within me, right then at that moment, and I had learned an important lesson of the natural world. Everything changes with the passage of life.
“No wonder Schmidt was being deferential — Taleb would eat him alive if they went head to head, ”
That’s a fact!
I have been reading Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” in which Nassim Taleb is frequently cited. While global warming is mentioned only once in passing and then only obliquely, the whole book is a forensic examination of the traps that seem to plague climate science. It really is quite extraordinary. Every chapter is a detailed description of the kinds of errors we have noticed in climate science, quantified and examined in rigour detail, for which he received a nobel prize in economics, without once mentioning the group that falls exactly into category he studies. While it means that climate science is not alone in human endeavours making these mistakes, it shows exactly how they are making mistakes by comparison to groups who are doing the same kind of thinking, but have been proven to be wrong.
Here are some little tasters:
Speaking of Bournelli’s law of utility and their (the author and his partner) discovery of Prospect theory:
“All this is rather obvious isn’t it? ….The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples could survive for so long. I can explain it only by the weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give he theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it.”
And how about this:
– Speaking of overconfidence:
“the result (of a study into autopsy reports versus diagnosis): ‘clinicians who were ‘completely certain’ of the diagnosis antemortem were wrong 40% of the time.”
His chapter on overconfidence is highly illuminating. in general, experts making assessments over the future (for example say in stock prices or economic performance) tend to perform worse than chance. That is to say, if you ask someone who is considered an expert in a complex field, they are more likely to be wrong than right. I therefore blame the ridiculously cold weather we have been having in Europe on climate science. Had they predicted cooling we would have had a better chance of some decent warm weather. Which reminds me of the last time they predicted cooling….
And this extremely interesting and pertinent point:
“If subjective confidence is not be trusted, how can we evaluate the probable validity of an intutive judgement? When do judgements reflect true expertise? When do they display the illusion of validity? The answer comes from two basic conditions for acquiring a skill:
• an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
• an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice.”
Neither which can be said for climate science.
Finally, he talks a lot about WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) and how we take the information to hand and make causal story based on the ease and “plausibility” with which it comes to mind. For example, we know that CO2 has heat trapping properties, we know that temperature has been rising at about the same time as CO2, therefore it must be CO2 that is causing the rise in temperatures.
I am quite amazed at how applicable this mans life’s work is to the examination of climate science and how over-confidence and inability to characterise uncertainty and ignorance has blighted it to the extent that modern society has bought so easily into the alarm over our future. If anyone wants to understand how it is that we got to this state of affairs, this book answers it with a clarity that I find breath-taking.
Agnostic says:
June 2, 2013 at 12:21 pm
“For example, we know that CO2 has heat trapping properties, we know that temperature has been rising at about the same time as CO2, therefore it must be CO2 that is causing the rise in temperatures.”
While I enjoyed your comment, please, not the heat-trapper! CO2 does not trap heat. It absorbs IR photons at color temperatures of about 200K and 600K ; and re-emits them, as due to Kirchhoff’s Law, absorptivity must equal emissivity at local thermal equilibrium.
Meaning, it redistributes infrared of these frequencies; it does not keep energy in the atmosphere. The redistribution leads to 50 % of the caught photons being directed downwards again.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/05/co2-heats-the-atmosphere-a-counter-view/
And for all those interested, notice how stretched the IR range is and how narrow the IR absorption bands are, and notice that they do not coincide with the roughly 300K at which surface objects typically have their blackbody spectrum peak.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight
“Sunlight in space at the top of Earth’s atmosphere at a power of 1366 watts/m2 is composed (by total energy) of about 50% infrared light, 40% visible light, and 10% ultraviolet light.”)
DirkH says:
June 2, 2013 at 1:14 pm
“Sunlight in space at the top of Earth’s atmosphere at a power of 1366 watts/m2 is composed (by total energy) of about 50% infrared light, 40% visible light, and 10% ultraviolet light.”)
————————————————————————————————————
What is the breakdown in percentages at the surface from those 3 sources? Do they maintain the same ratio in energy delivered at the surface?
RACookPE1978
In answer to your questions:
1. Do these models actually represent the real earth: as a globe with sunlight varying by latitude, season, and day-of-year? With albedo and clouds varying annually and with oceans and land boundaries accurate?
or are they Trenberth’s “flat earth” model – a half-disk perpetually bathed in sunlight at at an “average earth” with no oceans, lands, and only average albedos?
The global climate models represent the real Earth, with continents and oceans, and seasonally, latitudinally and dirunally varying solar insolation. The atmospheric part of the climate models, is the same type of model as used for short term weather prediction.
2. Have any models been run from 1850 through today’s conditions with 160 years of actual volcanic and aerosol levels? Or do they all begin at 1995 and become worthless (to 97% inaccuracy) within 20 years?
The models do try estimate volcanic and human emissions of aerosols over that time period.
The models, thus, are excellent tools to assist with the better understanding of climate processes. However, they do not yet have the skill to predict changes in climate statistics on the local, regional and (as is appearing more likely) the global scale.
Who is Gavin Schmidt?
Agnostic says: June 2, 2013 at 12:21 pm “I have been reading Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” in which Nassim Taleb is frequently cited.”
If I recall correctly, Taleb cited Kahneman in one of his earlier books, leading me to read Thinking Fast and Slow while I waited for ‘Antifragile’. Recently someone here WUWT mentioned Bayesianism, inference or statistics. E. T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (Cambridge 2003) will be as valuable and fully formal.
EJ said @ur momisugly June 1, 2013 at 6:20 pm
The orbit of Neptune falsified Newton’s Law of Gravity. It must be very disappointing for you that the equation remains in use to this very day.
goldminor says:
June 2, 2013 at 1:47 pm
“What is the breakdown in percentages at the surface from those 3 sources? Do they maintain the same ratio in energy delivered at the surface?”
No. Water droplets absorb IR photons and build up charge separation(*) with them. Clouds reflect short wave. Ozone absorbs some UV. Water vapor and CO2 absorb and re-emit LWIR.
Let’s see, do we find the average spectrum at the surface. Hmm, I find no averaging of measurements, only spectra of unknown provenance or marked as Modtran simulations.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/484
(*) = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVBEwn6iWOo
Every equation we use has a domain in which it is valid to the required accuracy. My standard problem for first year students is this: Measure the resistance of a standard tungsten filament light bulb. Given a 120 volt supply, calculate the current, calculate the power. Why is the bulb rated at 100 Watts?
The explanation is that the filament changes its resistance as it heats up. The naive application of Ohm’s Law results in a totally wrong answer if one uses the cold resistance of the bulb. In other words, just because there is an equation, it doesn’t mean you can rely on it.
You actually have to understand the conditions under which it is valid.
Newton’s Law of Gravity applies where it applies and doesn’t apply where it doesn’t apply. If you don’t know the difference, too bad for you!