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
From Dr. Judith Curry:
the climate models are not looking very useful at the moment
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the value of science comes from its ability to provide useful, reliable prediction. if it cannot provide reliable prediction, then it can be worse than useless, it can be harmful.
if we place our future in the hands of model predictions, and they turn out to be false, then we will have squandered our future and wasted billions of dollars in the process. funds that could have been used to cure cancer or malaria will have instead been spent tilting at windmills.
the purpose of science is not to “explain” why something happens. that is useless nonsense. each generation of scientists discovers new reasons “why” something happens, as our instruments and knowledge improves. “why” something happens is like this seasons fashions, it eventually goes out of style.
the lasting value of science is in its ability to make accurate predictions about the future. thus for example, while epicycles went out of style, for more than 1000 years they provided very accurate predictions about the orbit of the planets. even though the “why” was wrong, it didn’t matter to the value of the predictions. they were still accurate.
this is an important point in science and it is at the heart of science. we can never be sure about the “why”. this doesn’t prevent us from making very accurate predictions which deliver true value.
the same is true about climate science. ‘Why” the climate is warming is not an interesting question. Some say it is due to CO2, some say it is due to something else. It makes absolutely no difference.
If you can accurately predict the future climate, then the prediction has value regardless of the “why”. If you cannot accurately predict, then the prediction may be useless or it may be worse than useless, it may be harmful.
What will the Warmistas do without their useless climate models?
Go get drunk or something?
I see that as the only plausible solution.
rgbatduke, you write “Not a good time to be a climate scientist, especially one that vocally defended the use of such averages or high sensitivity climate models as predictive tools capable of generating confidence intervals as in AR4′s Summary for Policy Makers, one of the all time greatest travesties in science.”
I agree, and have been trying to make the same point for a few yeats. But, from what I have seen of the SOD, the same sort of travesty is going to take place in the AR5 in September 2013. How on earth can we stop this from happening?
Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity makes very accurate predictions about the trajectory of objects. Yet it requires action at infinite distance in zero time. Under Newton’s Law, if you wave your hand, this will instantly affect the gravitational attraction on the most distant star in the Universe.
Einstein’s General Relativity improves slightly on Newton’s Law, at the expense of being extremely cumbersome to calculate. Yet it relies on an entirely different “why” than Newton. If the Sun vanished at this moment, Newton predicts that the earth would immediately go out of orbit. GR on the other hand predicts that the earth would continue to orbit the non-existent sun for another 8.5 minutes.
Yet both theories deliver extremely accurate predictions about the path of the earth around the sun, while relying on an entirely different “why”. So therefore, what is the value of the “why” to science, when it makes no significant difference to the accuracy of the prediction?
the answer to “why” is an intellectual curiosity. it does not determine the value of science and is irrelevant to the value of science. why temperatures are increasing or decreasing is not interesting – it has no value – if you cannot predict which way they are going.
Steve Go to http://www.climate4you.com/
Go to Fig 3 in the global temperatures section look at the GISP ice core temps with clear millenial peaks now and 1000 and 2000 years ago Why avoid the obvious and not accept a decline from here in the 1000 year cycle. It is really not much of a leap to suggest a repeat of the 1000 – present temperature trends as seen in Fig 3 from latest post at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
(fig 5 from http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf )
The idea still confounds me that heat, after receiving some unfathomable (heh!) “go” signal, suddenly disappears from the atmosphere and runs off to hide in the deep ocean.
“Deep ocean heat” has been an issue for what, almost a year now? And I’ve seen NO plausible mechanism explained. NONE.
The models are just too Sexy for many to abandon. To many, their life and livelyhood depend directly upon them and thier marketable output. If models could sing, I believe this would be their song.
Appologies if I offend anyone, but the analogy/irony is too great to stop my mouse 🙂
rgb
It’s my guess every model has been falsified because of one thing or another.
temp, humidity, rain, snow, drought, ocean temp, antarctic ice, enso, tornadoes, hurricanes, major storms, etc.
Each model has it’s own failings:
this one we add CO2 and it gets hot
this one we add CO2 and it rains
this one we add CO2 and it quits snowing
this one we add CO2 and a tornado pops up
this one we add CO2 and everything dies…..
and when averaged none of it works.
cn
So humans pushing at most a few dozen ppm into the atmosphere doesn’t show up in atmospheric temperatures or surface temps or upper ocean temps but magically transports to the deep oceans of which we know less about than we do of Mars. Right. Perhaps a comprehensive thermal map of both content and deep ocean rift contributions will verify the warmista claim. What? Doesn’t exist? Color me shocked.
SAMURAI says (July 24, 2013 at 1:31 am): “Further complicating matters for the Warmunistas are: ”
Hey, I like that! I’d shorten it to “warmunist”, though, to reinforce the similarity. Is it new…aha! Google says it isn’t. Hope it catches on.
Eustace Cranch,
Most “deep ocean heat” is produced by under-water vulcanism. That is the ONLY reasonable mechanism whereby heat can “appear” in the deep ocean without first going through the upper ocean.
The recent five year forecast from the UK Met Office has been down-graded to almost zero warming for the next five years. There is a nice illustration of the revisions covered in some recent posts at Climate Audit, starting from
http://climateaudit.org/2013/07/15/nature-hides-the-decline/
The Met Office appears to be forecasting the falsification of all the IPCC models, including their own earlier predictions. If this is a genuine effort to return predictions to somewhere closer to reality then it probably should be welcomed. It is a pity that the words emanating from official sources do not yet appear to reflect the dawn. That’s politics, I guess. Telling the truth bluntly or too quickly can be painful.
I keep saying, any and all models are worthless – no, they’re worse that worthless because they are nothing but baseless constructs, whose sole purpose is to deceive the uninformed.
Chad Wozniak says:
July 24, 2013 at 10:02 am
I’m not willing to go that far for models in general, and even for climate models I don’t believe they were created for the purpose of deceiving the uninformed. I think this is just another case of our reach exceeding our grasp — we can create models but don’t know what all the relevant physical processes are so the models are at least incomplete. And we probably don’t have a long enough span of reliable instrumental data to validate them (just my opinion). I believe the faith many people seem to have in climate models is not justified, and that adding more computing power will make no fundamental difference. We need a more complete understanding before we can make reliable climate models.
Computer modeling in general is not useless. Look at what it has done for aircraft design, or optics, or any number of other fields.
GIGO explains the whole miserable episode. Let’s move on.
ferd berple: We use Einstein’s GR when picoseconds matter in a gravity well and gravity well curvature is significant otherwise Newton’s formulation works pretty well. In fact I was shown once how to derive Newtons gravity out of GR as a special case of initial conditions. So it isn’t really that there is a different “why”, just that Newton didn’t really give us a “why”, just a hand-waving “how”.
Bernd Felsche wrote a comment above
“Those climate models are like a class full of imbeciles which, when tested, show that no individual scored better than 20% in a test. Nevertheless, the teacher finds that every single question has been answered correctly by at least one imbecile so awards an A+ to the whole class.”
The above comment by Bernd is probably the most profound statement I have ever seen in understanding the “robustness” of the spaghetti plot of the “ensemble” of climate models. I burst out laughing.
Bravo for finding a way to communicate the idea in a spectacularly simple manner.
Thanks
Will
Just imagine a world, where everything, but absolutely everything would be wrapped into brown paper. The economic & environmental costs of that would surely be prohibitive, therefore the material, along with everything else related to wrapping should be banned immediately. The proposed regulation is entirely consistent with the Precautionary Principle.
Nah, RGB’s quote a couple of posts ago was MUCH better.
This idea of a pause is ridiculous and totally unscientific. Surely science makes a prediction of values and they are specific to a time. If they are not right at that time then the theory should be tossed in the dump.
More importantly they should be addressing the objections to the climate models from proven successful computer modellers in other fields that the models are facile and worthless because they do not model nature’s CO2 system so the effect of man’s is not realistic. I models a gross value of man’s emissions against the remainder in the atmosphere which is the net value, surely a very basic error also any changes could just as easily be the result of natural changes in behaviour of the CO2 system and would happen regardless of man’s activities.
Models are not supposed to be falsified by data. They are supposed to help predict future data. If they cannot do that, they do not need to be falsified, they are useless.
Yet both theories deliver extremely accurate predictions about the path of the earth around the sun, while relying on an entirely different “why”. So therefore, what is the value of the “why” to science, when it makes no significant difference to the accuracy of the prediction?
Challenge accepted!
a) Precession of the Perihelion of Mercury (Newtonian predictions are inaccurate)
b) Black holes and connections to deep cosmological whys (and predictions)
c) Gravity waves (impossible with Newton) perhaps, some day
d) Unified field theory (if/when) which will, no doubt, allow us to make many new predictions, possibly with enormous value. Who can tell?
e) But mostly, the whys in our worldview make an enormous difference in our course of actions. They bias our choices and affect our actions.
For example, both Einstein and Newton are wrong. I have an extremely accurate theory of gravitation. The Earth goes around the Sun because invisible fairies armed with a large cosmic computer do computations that provide them with a trajectory that greatly resembles that of Newton (or if you prefer, Einstein). They then grab the Earth and push it around with their tiny fairy wings fluttering in an invisible six dimensional dark matter fluid.
The thing is, my theory (which perfectly predicts the data) also states that the fairies will stop pushing the Earth next Tuesday unless we sacrifice a virgin by throwing her, naked, into a volcano today. Consequently I’ve been on a virgin hunt (damn, they are hard to find!) and have booked two tickets to Hawaii for next Sunday to save the world.
Too bad for the virgin, but the invisible fairies must be placated for the next 1000 years.
This is not a silly example. The Ptolemaic model worked to describe all the physical data any human would ever be able to see with the naked eye, to predict anything that mattered. More than what mattered — what difference does it make knowing that the planets orbit the sun or the other way around? The crops grow, we age and die the same either way. The model endorsed by the Catholic Church as “infallible truth” (the Biblical view of reality) described many things with invisible fairy theories that “worked well enough”, but the flat earth theory hid an entire new world literally beneath our feet with enormous value. The theory of universal gravitation, and Einsteins corrections of same (which is still wrong, BTW) and the still ungrasped TOE with quantum gravity may or may not work (at all levels and in all cases), they may not be correct if they work perfectly (we could, actually, live in The Matrix so that everything we think we know is false, a simulation, a projection from a completely different, far more complex reality we cannot easily measure or reach. Plato’s parable of the cave is more apropos today than it was when Plato wrote it.
But at least they are good for all the virgins in the world who would otherwise have been sacrificed to the mythologists with their dread use of the “and” and “or” operators in logical conjunction.
rgb
rgbatduke writes: “… unless we sacrifice a virgin…”
Could we not sacrifice simply the virginity thereof, and not waste the entire virgin in the volcano?