From the world of Claimatology™, comes this smackdown from Nature.
“The dramatic warming predicted after 2008 has yet to arrive.”
An article published today in Nature laments the dismal failure of climate models to predict climate a mere 5 years into the future, much less a century from now.
- “It’s fair to say that the real world warmed even less than our forecast suggested,” [modeller] Smith says. “We don’t really understand at the moment why that is.” “
- “Although I have nothing against this endeavour as a research opportunity, the papers so far have mostly served as a ‘disproof of concept’,” says Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt says that these efforts are “a little misguided”. He argues that it is difficult to attribute success or failure to any particular parameter because the inherent unpredictability of weather and climate is built into both the Earth system and the models. “It doesn’t suggest any solutions,” he says.
- “Because the climate does not usually change drastically from one year to the next, the model is bound to start off predicting conditions that are close to reality. But that effect quickly wears off as the real climate evolves. If this is the source of the models’ accuracy, that advantage fades quickly after a few years.”
- “Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, says that it could be a decade or more before this research really begins to pay off in terms of predictive power, and even then climate scientists will be limited in what they can say about the future.”
Limited in what they can say about the future?
Since when? Somebody please tell Jim Hansen he can’t say “the oceans will boil“.
The Nature article is here: http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2018-is-cloudy-with-record-heat-1.13344
h/t to the Hockey Schtick.
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Does this mean it’s OK for people to stop pretending they believe IPCC AR projections?
Jeff Tollefson
“It is one of the biggest mysteries in climate science: humans are pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today than ever before, yet global temperatures have not risen much in more than a decade. ”
Jeff? Maybe your theory is wrong?
Mark Bofill @ur momisugly July 11, 2013 at 6:40 am
Maybe that could start with the folks at US EPA, who could begin by vacating the endangerment finding based on the IPCC’s “work”.
“Kevin Trenberth…says that it could be a decade or more before this research really begins to pay off…”
The trick now for these guys is to put their warming predictions off until they are safely in retirement and no longer accountable.
In other words: “We have not a clue as to what is going on..”
Schmidt makes a good point that the approach of summing up the measured changes in climate “drivers,” projecting the rates of change into the future, and using that to predict future climate has been given a fair trial and has come up short. Even when the magnitudes can be reasonably easily calculated, the mechanisms can remain elusive.
Is anyone else struck by the discontinuity by which we suddenly decided in the 1990s that we could forecast global average temperatures for the next 100 years within a degree or two? Why did anyone ever believe that was possible? There was never any evidence for such a capability.
The inability to match reality for even 5 years invalidates the entire effort. Any new funding should be tied to a public admission of failure and a ten year media silence.
Failure of Climate Models?
What total complete and utter BS.
Climate Models are just computer models that do what they are programmed to do. They do NOT fail and can never fail – they do what they are built to do and no more and no less.
The FAILURE is with CLIMATE SCIENTISTS and in particular those that made grandiose catastrophic predictions instead of admitting that there is still a lot that we don’t know that we don’t know about climate. The FAILURE is with THEM.
The FAILURE is also with the UN IPCC, Western Governments, media and NGO’s like Sierra, WWF and Greenpeace. These organizations are no longer trustworthy to present science in a balanced unbiased manner – they appear to be governed by agendas and self interest (money) and have completely lost any sense of moral compass. The FAILURE is with THEM.
I have learned that it was never about the climate. It is about the money. The redistribution of wealth was from the ordinary folks to the friends of the rich and powerful through something called “green energy”. You can’t call a politician anything worse than calling him a “politician”. Maybe a threat to mankind is close.
Jeremy@6:59
Hear hear. That applies the blame to where it belongs, not the ‘models’ which are merely helpless pieces of Code and Algorithms.
“They do NOT fail and can never fail”
Yeah, that’s what I say about programs I write too 😉
Mikeyj says @ur momisugly July 11, 2013 at 7:06 am
It’s that and much more.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/18/ipcc-official-%E2%80%9Cclimate-policy-is-redistributing-the-worlds-wealth%E2%80%9D/
Well, they say that “past preformance is no guarantee for future performance”. Thus, when “past performance” was utterly dismal, future performance could be brilliant, possibly, hopefully, who knows.
These people must be unreformed optimists.
It is “a little misguided” to try and understand why the predictions were so wrong. If arrogance comes before the fall, then that attitude is it. In a real science trying to understand why your models fail is at the very centre of the quest.
The UK Met Office admit it too 30 years to make 4-day forecasts as accurate as 1-day forecasts, so how can they even contemplate x-year forecasts, e.g. 5, 10, 50, 100, especially when the changeability and uncertainty from day-to-day multiplies with every extra day.
The failure of the “climate scientists” has not stopped Obama’s EPA from continuing to destroy the economy through energy regulation. Pump the monetary policy turn off the energy.
Although I was surprised to see this article in Nature, since they have been AGW cheerleaders/doomsayers in the past, they probably had no choice to print an article like this or they would face a complete loss of credibility. Of course IMO, they have already lost their credibility and are trying to regain it.
From the paper: “Another challenge stems from the fact that each model has its own equilibrium state — the climate that it generates naturally if left on its own. By plugging in actual values for the ocean and atmosphere, researchers pull the model away from its natural state. When the model starts to run forward in time, it immediately begins to drift back to its preferred climate, which can introduce additional complications.”
It (the model) begins to drift back to its preferred climate? Does that mean what it sounds like it means? Because it sure sounds like it means that regardless of the initial inputs, the model is going to end up “drifting” to a preordained (“preferred”) climate prediction. Preferred by the modeler, no doubt.
Make a forecast using a dart board; build the model that eventually generates the dart-board-selected result regardless of initial inputs; select inputs; get expected result.
Isn’t this essentially what they’re saying they do? They prefer the models to show warming, and build them to meet that single specification? That is, “each model has its own equilibrium state.”
Seriously, is this how it works? If so, it’s all a much bigger crock of bull than I thought, and it was already a pretty large crock. And I can certainly see where such a process, once underway, could “introduce additional complications.”
From the Nature paper “Smith says. “We don’t really understand at the moment why that is.””
I find this to be a very interesting statement. The UK Met. Office used the Smith et al study as the basis for their prediciton of future climate. Then, at Christmas 2012, they quietly changed the forecast, but gave no reason or analysis about this change. If Smith is right, and I suspect he is, and they dont know why his study did not give the desired result, what is the basis for the Met. Office believing the new forecast is any better that the old one?
Climate models are wrong because their basic assumptions are wrong. Trenberth lives in hope but if the models are wrong now they will become worse as time proceeds, this is obvious to all except those who depend on them for their income.
philjourdan says: July 11, 2013 at 6:52 am
“He [Gavin Schmidt] argues that it is difficult to attribute success or failure to any particular parameter because the inherent unpredictability of weather and climate is built into both the Earth system and the models. >/blockquote>
And yet they call those who ask the same questions (why) all sorts of childish names. But they admit they have no clue what they are talking about.”
If childish name calling were their only sin, I’d rejoice. Much worse is that they want to rapidly and drastically change the way we produce and use energy. In their feeble minds, “saving the world” (or more accurately, thinking that you’re saving the world) justifies any and all kinds of idiocy.
Also from the article: “Even advocates have no illusions about the challenges ahead. Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, says that it could be a decade or more before this research really begins to pay off in terms of predictive power, and even then climate scientists will be limited in what they can say about the future. But many people might welcome hints about what’s to come. ‘For a farmer in Illinois,’ Trenberth says, ‘any indications about what to expect could turn out rather valuable.’ ”
I wonder if the new focus on short term climate modeling isn’t aimed at the post-grant world? When the grants run out, where will the money come from? Probably nowhere, given their results thus far, unless they can convince that “farmer in Illinois” that they’ve created something “rather valuable.”
Personally, I think the day that such a farmer turns over any money to a climate modeler will be a long time coming, although farmers do pay out for private weather forecasts. lf the modelers can blur the distinction between climate and weather, they might just find a few suckers out there, outside the government, that is. Alternatively, they could convince government forecasters to purchase them and provide them free to the public, which could then safely ignore them.
When the model starts to run forward in time, it immediately begins to drift back to its preferred climate,
===
no…..the computer game does what it was programmed to do
So no matter what you feed into it……it give the results the “scientists” expected
These computer games have been a 100% fail…..got nothing right
Here is a quote from a recent post on the State of the Climate wars from my blog at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.
“.Fig 1 is but one illustration among an ever increasing number, of the growing discrepancy between model outputs and reality.This disconnect has been acknowledged by the establishment science community which is now busy suggesting various epicycle like theories as to where the “missing” heat went.Some say its in the oceans (Trenberth) some say its due to Chinese aerosols (Hansen) but the all main actors still persist in the view that it will appear Lazarus like at some unspecified future time.This is like the Jehovah’s witnesses recalculating the end of the world each time a specified doomsday passes.
In Britain , the gulf between the Met Office expectations for the last several years and the actual string of cold and snowy winters and wet summers which has occurred has made the Met Office a laughing stock-to the point of recently holding a meeting of 25 “experts” to try to figure out where they went wrong.
The answer is simple.Their climate models are incorrectly structured because they are based on three irrational and false assumptions. First that CO2 is the main climate driver ,second that in calculating climate sensitivity the GHE due to water vapour should be added to that of CO2 as a feed back effect and third that the GHE of water vapour is always positive.As to the last point the feedbacks cannot be positive otherwise we wouldn’t be here to talk about it .
……………..
Temperature drives both CO2 and water vapour independently,. The whole CAGW – GHG scare is based on the obvious fallacy of putting the effect before the cause.As a simple (not exact) analogy controlling CO2 levels to control temperature is like trying to lower the temperature of an electric hot plate under a boiling pan of water by capturing and sequestering the steam coming off the top.A corollory to this idea is that the whole idea of a simple climate sensitivity to CO2 is nonsense and the sensitivity equation has no physical meaning unless you already know what the natural controls on energy inputs are already ie the extent of the natural variability.
Furthermore the modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. There is no way of knowing whether the outputs after the parameterisation of the multiple inputs merely hide compensating errors in the system as a whole. The IPCC AR4 WG1 science section actually acknowledges this fact. Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections.It concludes:
“Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- ie we don’t know what future temperatures will be and we can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what mere assumptions went into the “plausible” models to be tested anywayanyway” ”
In short – modelling is not a useful way of making climate forecasts. For a better method check my blog via the link given above.