From Dr. Judith Curry:
They seem to obliquely admit the inadequacy of climate models by saying that they have not been falsified by the recent pause. Well, even if they have not been falsified, the climate models are not looking very useful at the moment, and climate model-derived values of climate sensitivity are seeming increasingly unconvincing.
From this post: UK Met Office on the pause
“and climate model-derived values of climate sensitivity are seeming increasingly unconvincing.”
I am confused about the meaning of “Climate sensitivity” – has it a well defined meaning?
Is she saying Surface and air temperatures are bad proxies for what is happening overall, because the new argument is that the heat is there, but has been sucked out of the atmosphere and hidden in the deep oceans which are warming at a rate of .01c every five years. That means the measured temp record from the atmosphere is insensitve to what is going on in the total system, and is an insensitive as a proxy for the whole system.
Taken to the logical conclusion this means they have been measuring the wrong thing, and have no way of knowing what was happening in previous periods, since they have no long term historical record for deep ocean temps. How can they know how the present warming period compares with previous warming periods, they have no historical record of what the total, very complex system was doing in the MWP.
Ironically, this hypothetical “class of imbeciles” actually exists. (Warning: the following contains run-on sentences and should be avoided by those who are offended by grammatically dubious rants).
As individuals, their knowledge of Science, History, and Human Nature are essentially useless. Their sole reason for being in the “class” is that they were able to win a popularity contest, a rigged one at that, where they were able to beat up their opponents, either literally or figuratively.
This “class of imbeciles” are known as “elected officials”, although you could also subclass them as “Congress” or “The Senate” or “The Administration”, or stereotype them as “leftists” or “liberals” or “treehuggers”, or insult them as “idiots”, “morons”, or “dolts”. These people do occasionally get something right, and if you average the entire group’s achievements you would find that overall someone at some point gets it right.
The problem is, we only hear about something they got right, and never are told about all the rest that they got grievously wrong. The “class of imbeciles” would be completely powerless without the support of their doting parents, who only tell us of their successes and never about the failures or the horrendous “unintended consequences”, a concept they seem completely unfamiliar with in spite of large crowds predicting them. The doting parents, of course, are the media… the ones who generated this group of drooling cretins, and spoon-feed them with a pablum of oversimplified and incorrect “Science” rhetoric that would make previous generations laugh at first, until they realize it’s serious, at which point they’d cry. The media aren’t subtle, either. You have to respect an organization that can not only make people vote for 0bama, twice, but make them think they did a good thing and feel good about him. That’s power.
People don’t think for themselves anymore, instead they subject themselves to bite-sized morsels of knowledge, doled out by a corrupt education system at first, then a corrupt media that is more than willing to tell people whatever they are paid to tell them. Come on, deny it. Tell me that Science, or Scientific American, or National Geographic, or any others that were formerly reliable and genuinely attempting to communicate the latest information, have not fallen completely down the rabbit hole, passing Alice along the way to irrelevance. Not even the pretty pictures will save NatGeo, because lately I see better digital camera images from tourists all over the world that don’t need to be staged or have someone “on assignment” get paid for 6 months of sitting in a blind somewhere in Africa to get.
The Internet gives people the illusion that all of the world’s knowledge is at their fingertips, and they are completely oblivious to the manipulation behind the scenes, lying and cheating at “Science” as evidenced by Connolley et al. In fact, the Internet does not give people more knowledge, it makes them stupid. I know people who pull out their phone and use maps to walk 3 blocks away, and can get lost in a city of 50,000 without their devices. Half the younger people I know can’t even tell West from East, in spite of the fact that from almost everywhere in Calgary the horizon to the West is jagged by mountains.
Okay, there’s my rant for the day. Carry on.
The models dont work for two reasons…one is that there are too many variables…many poorly understood…second is that absorption by CO2 is saturated…as pointed out by Angstrom in 1900…yes, as far back as then…three years ago at the height of the hysteria I predicted undeniable cooling within five years…prediction right on track…
@rgb Finally, if “climate models” in general are not yet falsified, just how long does the pause have to be before they are?
The usual warmist rule of thumb is 2-5 years longer than it has been so far.
Bloke, I believe there is 97% agreement on that, as well.
That word Obliquely could well become the tag line for all of global warming science of the late 20th and 21st centuries. I hope future enlightened generations will look back at it that way too.
Why would anyone be surprised at a “pause”? There was one from 1940-1970, too, so it isn’t like it’s never happened before. And from 1850-1880. So what’s new?
On the other hand NO ONE WITH A BRAIN can expect a straight linear regression to a chaotic systems to hold true for more than a short time. Duh. Are they slow upstairs?
The pauses show clear signs that there is cyclicity to the climate, and that different regimes hold true for some periods. A true oscillation? People don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around a cycle on an ascending overall slope – but that is what the data show, even though no one is giving it much attention. (Why I don’t know)
Coming out of the LIA, if the general trend isn’t upward, then we would still be IN the LIA. Duh again. Lay a sine-type curve on that with a 60-year pitch, and you can make some nice predictions that come true.
The “pause” is just the non-ascending part of the cycle.
Bloke, I thought it was either: {retirement_date} + 2years or {tenure_date} + 5years
John says:
July 24, 2013 at 4:26 am
“You could consider other evidence such as ocean heat content data, ocean thermal expansion data, energy imbalance data. None of which supports the theory temperatures have paused or stopped.”
Temperatures are measured. It is not a theory that they stopped warming, it is an observation.
The fact that you don’t know this shows that you are a simple activist or True Believer, not a rational thinker. Or maybe just totally uninformed about how science works in general.
Steve Garcia The general upward trend is part of a millenial cycle with peaks at 1000 and 200 +/-
Heres another quote from the latest post at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
“The point of most interest in Fig 3 is the present temperature peak and the MWP peak at 1000 AD which correlate approximately with a solar millenial cycle .The various minima of the Little Ice age and the Dalton minimumof the early 19th century also show up well.
It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles.On the basis that the sequence from 1000- 2000 may be about to repeat – and also referring to the Oulu cosmic ray related neutron count time series the following climate forecasts may be made .
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent – with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
For a dicussion of the effects of cooling on future weather patterns see the 30 year Climate Forecast 2 Year update at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2012/07/30-year-climate-forecast-2-year-update.html
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn’t lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in – some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure – say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty drops rapidly.”
The primary value of any computer model is to verify that the modelers completely understand the system they are trying to model. The consensus, so far, is obvious.
@rgbatduke at 5:41 am:
Hilarious!
Let’s try putting this in Frankensteinian terms:
— Their aim was to bring life to a dead backwater of science in a region bypassed by history (East Anglia),
— They thought they were studs because of those electrodes on their necks (the newfangled computer thingies),
— They befriended the blind (policymakers), and spilled hot soup (boiling oceans) all over them, and
— They are doomed to go down in flames when everyone realizes just how butt ugly they are (actually their ‘science’).
Nice story line!
We skeptics ourselves are the pitchforks and torches. And we are glad to be of service in a good cause.
Gentlemen! Sharpen your pitchforks!
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Obvious typo at opening of previous post – should be “The general upward trend is part of a millenial cycle with peaks at 1000 and 2000 +/- “
“The recent pause in global surface temperature rise does not, in itself, materially alter the risks of substantial warming of the Earth by the end of this century. – UK Met Office”
All the predictions of us 97%ers were wrong in the short term, but trust us in the long term!
“They seem to obliquely admit the inadequacy of climate models by saying that they have not been falsified by the recent pause. ”
Well I don’t suppose they have. But this is the phrasing of a propagandist surely? The models are dependent on the conditions you feed into them. So what parameters do you need to feed into these all-encompassing models to get them to predict an 18 year pause?
I would guess Chinese CO2 output for 18 years exponential increase = zero temperature increase implies sensitivity to CO2 = 0. End of.
Expecting CO2 to trap energy into the Earth’s climate is a bit like expecting a meat skewer to be a useful way of keeping water molecules in a bucket. There are ways around it you see….
Why not assert a variation on Aristotle’s principle of Impetus, to effect that an arrow flies parallel to the ground until its “force” has been exhausted, whereupon it abruptly stops and falls straight down [!]. Despite all experience –“evidence” is the wrong word– this asininity was taught as holy writ in academe for nigh 2,000 years (c. BC 350 – AD 1625).
So what’s to prevent a Cool Phase “impetus effect” from kicking in a century from now, halting suddenly before “falling flat,” that is reversing in line with AGW Catastrophists’ peculiarly anti-rational scenarios? By Met Office rules, Invisible Flying Rabbits may well engender climate Armageddon… after all, who can they prove they won’t?
rgbatduke says:
July 24, 2013 at 5:41 am
There are two questionable assumptions here: that lawmakers are (1) less complicit and (2) more courageous than the climate scientists. Of course, that won’t prevent the lawmakers from pretending to be outraged because they’ve been lied to …
Back to the essence of this thread, I would be very interested in your thoughts on what it would take to actually validate a climate model. How would you do it? Do even we have enough reliable data? Has anything approaching a rigorous validation been attempted?
Thanks; I always find your comments educational.
Weather is chaotic. It does not have a single “average” temperature. Rather, it has many average temperatures, that cycle and interact at the period of the attractors.
The notion of modelling climate as an “average” temperature with “variance” is a statistical nonsense. The average and variance will change with the scale due to the differing period attractors.
Contrary to the learned opinion of climate modellers, the “noise” will not converge to zero in such a situation, except at time periods that approach infinity. The notion that you can project climate 100 years into the future with 150 years of data is pure nonsense.
Climate models are the statistical equivalent of sitting in Los Angeles, watching cars driving east on the highway, and predicting they are “on average” all going to New York.
Disko Troop says:
July 24, 2013 at 1:08 am
Very well done. I think I shall now refer to climate model ensembles and Mr. Bean.
Obviously the data need to be adjusted.
/sarc (do I need that?)
Some enterprising young modeller should start building a model around lower CO2 sensitivities, just to see what happens. That would take some curiosity, and a thick skin. It would lead to ostracism after other main stream climatologists found out, but perhaps a longer career after being proven on the right track.
A Calculator based on a Climate Model is at this link,
http://www.cato.org/blog/current-wisdom-we-calculate-you-decide-handy-dandy-carbon-tax-temperature-savings-calculator?
@Dale Rainwater. Norman Page:
In response to your comments:
On your link you say, “g) I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought, correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.”
Duh. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. THIS is the single one claim that we all should be harping on about.
The Holocene record is not one of cold, but of warmth. 1,000 year cycles during the Holocene are not terrible climate disasters, except for the blips called the “8.2 kya event”, the 536 AD downturn, and the LIA, all of which are not understood at all, even if we may claim to. Bond events are not understood, and IMHO are completely MISunderstood, another case of a tail being claimed to be wagging the dog.
Your 1-5 are reasonable but are also explained well enough by the 60-year-cycle; the 1,000-year one does not need to be invoked.
Your #6 contradicts the general rise coming out of the LIA. Based on the RWP and the MWP, IMHO, we are more likely to reach a climate optimum than to see us head straight back into another LIA.
#7 – Who knows or cares what it will be in 2650, 20-something generations from now?
#8 – CO2 is already greening the planet.
#9 – See #6 response
In general, we agree that cycles need to be included in the analysis. This idea of putting straight-line regressions on natural-world data is the most insane and IMMATURE thing I’ve ever seen. Straight line projections won’t be good for more than a handful of years, so WHY DO IT?
Speaking of immature, climatology is a VERY immature science, one that is trying to join the big boys like biology, physics, and geology, but which needs to be collecting data for another century or three before they will have adequate data to make 100-year predictions. Making ANY long-term predictions with what is known and half-known only shows how adolescent the whole enterprise is. The computers went to their heads and made them all “greedy reductionists.”
Climate science is a joke.
John,
18 years of no warming is OF COURSE a statistically significant pause in temperatures. To say otherwise is simply incorrect.
You can hand-wave all you like about ocean temperatures and energy imbalance and whatever else you like to hand-wave about, but the simple fact is, the models predicted accelerating warming of the global average temperature, and this simply isn’t currently happening. Warming of the oceans has happened SOMEWHAT, and has been due to perfectly natural causes. There is no evidence whatsoever of accelerating warming of the oceans. Sea Level Rise simply isn’t happening. Energy imbalance is a myth. All energy has to go SOMEWHERE. If you think there is an imbalance, that simply indicates that we don’t understand the Earth’s energy budget properly.
Unlike you, I suspect we will see a few more years on the current plateau, followed by at least 30 years of cooling. Come back in 30 years and we will see which one of us is correct. I don’t want to see actual temperatures in January in Chicago at -40F (with -70F wind chills) like they were in the late 1970s, but I strongly suspect winters will be like that again relatively soon, and perversely, I kinda hope that they are just to finally put an end to this AGW charade.
Not been falsified? But they haven’t been validated. If we doing science, the models are considered invalid until proven otherwise.
Welcome to 21 century
politicalclimate science.