Note: The video has been updated to reflect the fact that Climate Models Fail is now available for sale in Kindle and pdf formats. I also replaced the word “employed” with “used” (as suggested by many viewers) and corrected one of the years discussed in the video.
# # #
This YouTube video provides a preview of my new book Climate Models Fail. The book discusses and illustrates how the climate models being used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report show no skill at simulating surface temperatures, precipitation and sea ice area.
Climate Models Fail is now available for sale in Amazon Kindle and .pdf editions.
My writing style definitely leans to the technical side, as visitors here well know. To make it easier to read, Climate Models Fail is being proofread by someone without a technical background. Her suggestions have been great.
And for those wondering, the cover art is by Josh of Cartoons by Josh.
A note about the video: In addition to providing an overview of climate model failings, I also threw in a few jabs at the IPCC that many of you will enjoy.
The Parent Signature on the scorecard on the cover of the book says: “Mrs P.”.
Rajendra Pachauri’s Mom I presume?
Indeed the models have failed, the elusive hot spot has been more elusive than than the fabled “G” spot. The canary of AGW the warming arctic has cooled and the canary lives.
The satellite system measuring temp to prove global warming, has proved no warming. The giant fudges applied to the temperature data have failed to cover the declining temperatures.
Failed models are only the tip of the iceberg, a politically inspired faith based system of manipulation is the problem. Declaring CO2 a pollutant is a crime against humanity, disproving AGW is only 10% of the battle, it is getting honesty elected into the political heart of our countries that will end this non-sense.
@izen
The fact that science and engineering use computer models has nothing to do with the validity of the climate models. Real scientists and engineers know the limitations of their models. Meteorologists, for example, will tell you the weather models are only accurate for a few days, for instance, while climate modelers insist they can accurately predict the global climate decades in the future.
The fact that models are useful in understanding a problem or how a complex system MAY work does not mean a model outputs facts or data. All computer programs are constrained by the universal law of GIGO — Garbage In equals Garbage Out.
The fact that the models don’t accurately reflect what is happening in the real world means the modelers don’t accurately understand the problem or are unable to properly express the functioning of the climate system using a computer program.
BTW: The climate model code I’ve seen looks like it was written by second-year junior college students.
Good stuff, Bob Tisdale. The data on lack of Pacific SST warming since ’91 got my attention immediately. What is your take on the latest theory that Russian Subs have been capturing Trenberth’s missing heat thence releasing it in the unplumbed, darkest oceanic depths?
Bob Tisdale,
Your achievement speaks well for your future.
Thanks for your many contributions.
I think model funding is already significantly and negatively impacted by US Congressional sequestration. Your book may extend the impact.
I get frequent emails from the AGU complaining about sequestration.
John
“Meteorologists, for example, will tell you the weather models are only sorta accurate for a few
dayshours…”There, fixed it for ya.
Mike M says: @ur momisugly September 13, 2013 at 6:21 am
Which brings up the broader point – who is this here IPCC anyway? Perhaps a mention that, ” the IPPC is a program of a large well known political organization … the United Nations.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Bob, You might also want to read what the IPCC mandate is all about.
Most people think current climate science is funded to find out what causes the weather to vary but that is not what the IPCC is actually looking at. The whole basis of the current climate science funding is “understanding of human induced climate change” and not about understanding climate and that is why the models are wrong.
izen says: “As everyone knows that does not make a map useless.”
Dr. Freeman Dyson says: “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”
Basically, Izen is floating the idea that the degree of GCM’s being ‘wrong’ is so small you will not even notice it if it was a map. In truth, if GCM’s were like a road map, it will have roads that may or may not actually exist, roads with swapped names/ route numbers, roads that run perpendicular to their true direction and street addresses adjusted to make you believe you are traveling in one direction when you are actually going in another:
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
@izen
“Each decade has been significantly warmer than the preceding decade for around a century now.”
This is so demonstrably incorrect that I guess no one is taking the time to say it. Why bother?
Izen, the temperature has been going up and down in a 60 year cycle. Yes, there is a general trend, but there is nothing like a continuous rise. It is up and down decades at a time. The models do have some things right, but not temperature, and the heat accumulation seems to be pretty iffy too. The proof is that teams are out looking for missing heat in the oceans.
When the clouds are dealt with correctly, we can get back to relying on models.
Low Sun but high UV ?
http://www.aemet.es/es/eltiempo/observacion/radiacion/ultravioleta?l=barcelona&f=anual
http://www.aemet.es/es/eltiempo/observacion/radiacion/ultravioleta?l=madrid&f=anual
http://www.aemet.es/es/eltiempo/observacion/radiacion/ultravioleta?l=valencia&f=anual
izen
You state: “…Each decade has been significantly warmer than the preceding decade for around a century now. …”
I call BS on that statement! The decade of the 30’s, preHansenizing, is still the warmest decade in past 150 years. Just compare Hansen’s temperature trend published in 1999 with his most recent trend and see how much he has magically cooled that decade.
The ’70 were nearly 0.5C cooler than the 30’s. It is a sine wave Of approximately 60 year period. The decade at the peak of the cycle will be the warmest, and the decade at the bottom of the cycle will be the coldest.
The GCM’s, including the most recent version, are an EPIC fail. Someone using a simple 60 year sine wave and a 0.58C/century linear trend would have been far more accurate over the past 12 decades than any of these models. They are essentially worthless in their current form because they minimize natural variability and elevate the impact of CO2 contration changes by two orders of magnitude.
If the models don’t match observations, CHANGE THE MODELS!
Bill
Izen, if you had bothered to do a fundamental analysis of GCMs, and looked at how their most important features actually work mathematically, and what results the CMIP3 archive produced for AR4, then you would realize how false your comment above is. AR4 cherry picked studies and ingnored a wealth of observational data to conclude UTrH was roughly constant. It admitted the models did poorly on clouds, ignored that every piece of evidence shows a positive cloud feedback is at best overstated and at worst flat wrong. Now, this was not an accident, because CMIP5 models are equally failing at things like the pause and cloud feedback, and leaked AR5 WG1 SOD repeats the errors. All extensively documented in my book chapter and in subsequent posts at Climate Etc.
When you know a map is wrong, you fix it rather than rely on it.
Ray:
At September 13, 2013 at 6:41 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/13/a-video-preview-of-climate-models-fail/#comment-1415972
you ask
I answer: THEY CAN’T.
It seems I need to post the following yet again and I apologise to all who are bored with seeing it again.
None of the models – not one of them – could match the change in mean global temperature over the past century if it did not utilise a unique value of assumed cooling from aerosols. So, inputting actual values of the cooling effect (such as the determination by Penner et al.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/25/1018526108.full.pdf?with-ds=yes )
would make every climate model provide a mismatch of the global warming it hindcasts and the observed global warming for the twentieth century.
This mismatch would occur because all the global climate models and energy balance models are known to provide indications which are based on
1.
the assumed degree of forcings resulting from human activity that produce warming
and
2.
the assumed degree of anthropogenic aerosol cooling input to each model as a ‘fiddle factor’ to obtain agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature.
More than a decade ago I published a peer-reviewed paper that showed the UK’s Hadley Centre general circulation model (GCM) could not model climate and only obtained agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature by forcing the agreement with an input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling.
The input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling is needed because the model ‘ran hot’; i.e. it showed an amount and a rate of global warming which was greater than was observed over the twentieth century. This failure of the model was compensated by the input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling.
And my paper demonstrated that the assumption of aerosol effects being responsible for the model’s failure was incorrect.
(ref. Courtney RS An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999).
More recently, in 2007, Kiehle published a paper that assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models.
(ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007).
Kiehl found the same as my paper except that each model he assessed used a different aerosol ‘fix’ from every other model. This is because they all ‘run hot’ but they each ‘run hot’ to a different degree.
He says in his paper:
And, importantly, Kiehl’s paper says:
And the “magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing” is fixed in each model by the input value of aerosol forcing.
Thanks to Bill Illis, Kiehl’s Figure 2 can be seen at
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8167/kiehl2007figure2.png
Please note that the Figure is for 9 GCMs and 2 energy balance models, and its title is:
It shows that
(a) each model uses a different value for “Total anthropogenic forcing” that is in the range 0.80 W/m^-2 to 2.02 W/m^-2
but
(b) each model is forced to agree with the rate of past warming by using a different value for “Aerosol forcing” that is in the range -1.42 W/m^-2 to -0.60 W/m^-2.
In other words the models use values of “Total anthropogenic forcing” that differ by a factor of more than 2.5 and they are ‘adjusted’ by using values of assumed “Aerosol forcing” that differ by a factor of 2.4.
So, each climate model emulates a different climate system. Hence, at most only one of them emulates the climate system of the real Earth because there is only one Earth. And the fact that they each ‘run hot’ unless fiddled by use of a completely arbitrary ‘aerosol cooling’ strongly suggests that none of them emulates the climate system of the real Earth.
Richard
Greg Goodman says: “‘video: modellers employed by the IPCC’
“are you sure about that?”
Yup!
From Websters:
em•ploy
transitive verb \im-ˈplȯi, em-\
: to use (something) for a particular purpose …
I love the way Izen attempts to explain, how a broken clock accurately indicates, the correct time, twice per day, and therefore is a valid instrument, and extremely useful to the climate community. Such biased warmism is constantly winning thinking minds over to the skeptical viewpoint. We need to do nothing more than let such speak, as often, as they can.
Bob T, you’ve come a long ways baby and the journey was certainly interesting. Thank-you and good luck. GK
@ur momisugly izen says: September 13, 2013 at 5:08 am
That is either a bald faced lie, or the worst example of plain stupidity ever. Even after the “adjustments” to the data sets, the 1930s were still warmer than the 1940s. And that is just one example.
Science is not about lying izen.
lurker, passing through laughing says: “Greg Goodman makes a good point: The IPCC gets to have its cake and eat it too: They compile work of those they approve of. They do not actually employ modelers or run models, as I understand it.”
See my reply to Greg Goodman
Gail Combs: Thanks. I had the same idea. This is from page 20 of “Climate Models Fail”:
More than 20 years have passed since the IPCC’s first assessment report in 1990, and the climate science community still cannot simulate natural factors that can cause global warming over multidecadal periods — or that stop it cold in its tracks. There’s a very basic reason for this: in their consensus-building efforts, governments have only paid for research about the hypothetical impacts of manmade greenhouse gases. They did not fund research to determine why climate has changed and will change in the future.
Just look at how the IPCC defines its role. The following quote is from the IPCC organization History webpage:
Today the IPCC’s role is as defined in Principles Governing IPCC Work, “…to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”
Climate science is now anchored, stagnating, unable to free itself of an astronomically high percentage of peer-reviewed climate science studies, which blame manmade greenhouse gases for climate change, without comprehending the natural factors that actually cause multidecadal variations in temperatures and precipitation.
Bob T:
So from Webster, (“something”– not someone) the models are employed by IPCC, not the modellers. Goodman is right and you should change your sentence.
izen says:
To quote an old assessment of models made a Bayesian:-
“”essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”
Yes, but some are worthless or even dangerous in that they mislead (intentionally?) as do the IPCC computer models. Any good an engineer must sorts out the junk from the useful models. This skill is lacking in the global warming/climate change community. I can’t help but think it is intentional since the facts are clear and are being ignored.
Bob, your work on ENSO is fanastic. thanks.
fantastic that is.
Bob,
I watched the entire video and it is excellent , congratulations and best wishes with the excellent book.
I plan to selectively distribute your video link since it is clear, easily understood, yet thorough.
Keep up the pressure on the CAGW believers.
I agree. Many readers will not see it Bob’s way, and he will “lose” them to some degree.
Do all computational climate models fail indeed? Is there not at least a single one of them (with a specific parametrization scheme or whatever), which is not falsified by measurements collected during the last one and a half decade?
If there is one (or more), the way science is supposed to proceed is to abandon all falsified models immediately and keep working on the surviving subset.
I am getting curious now. In case the latter subset is not empty, what is their long term forecast and how it differs from the full ensemble average used by the IPCC?