Dr. Judith Curry writes:
As the IPCC struggles with its inconvenient truth – the pause and the growing discrepancy between models and observations – the obvious question is: why is the IPCC just starting to grapple with this issue now, essentially two minutes before midnite of the release of the AR5?
…
My blog post on the Fyfe et al. paper triggered an email from Pat Michaels, who sent me a paper that he submitted in 2010 to Geophysical Research Letters, that did essentially the same analysis as Fyfe et al., albeit with the CMIP3 models.
…
Assessing the consistency between short-term global temperature trends in observations and climate model projects
Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, John R. Christy, Chad S. Herman, Lucia M. Liljegren, James D. Annan
Abstract. Assessing the consistency between short-term global temperature trends in observations and climate model projections is a challenging problem. While climate models capture many processes governing short-term climate fluctuations, they are not expected to simulate the specific timing of these somewhat random phenomena—the occurrence of which may impact the realized trend. Therefore, to assess model performance, we develop distributions of projected temperature trends from a collection of climate models running the IPCC A1B emissions scenario. We evaluate where observed trends of length 5 to 15 years fall within the distribution of model trends of the same length. We find that current trends lie near the lower limits of the model distributions, with cumulative probability-of-occurrence values typically between 5% and 20%, and probabilities below 5% not uncommon. Our results indicate cause for concern regarding the consistency between climate model projections and observed climate behavior under conditions of increasing anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.
The authors have graciously agreed for me to provide links to their manuscript: [manuscriptMichaels_etal_2010 ] and [supplementary material Michaels_etal_GRL10_SuppMat].
Drum roll . . . the paper was rejected. I read the paper (read it yourself), and I couldn’t see why it was rejected, particularly since it seems to be a pretty straightforward analysis that has been corroborated in subsequent published papers.
The rejection of this paper raised my watchdog hackles, and I asked to see the reviews. I suspected gatekeeping by the editor and bias against the skeptical authors by the editor and reviewers.
Read more: Peer review: the skeptic filter
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Mark Bofill says:
September 20, 2013 at 9:31 am
Climate Etc. has a heck of a troll infestation problem. Crazy distribution of quality and garbage comments IMO.
***
It’s too bad that Climate Etc is dominated by serial thread-bombers. Too tedious for me to read. Fortunately moderation here at WUWT deters most of ’em.
– – – – – – –
richardscourtney.
Thanks for your comment. These themes of yours are always instructive of human nature. I do appreciate them.
Persistence . . .
Let me see, that is the fourth time on four separate threads within ~ the last week or so that you have preemptively and actively engaged in disruption of my attempts at dialog with 3 different individuals.
After more than 1,000 comments within the last 5 years on WUWT, for the very first time I have the following observation:
The ambiance and hospitality of Anthony’s WUWT house is lessoned somewhat of late.
John
John Whitman:
At September 21, 2013 at 6:48 am you say to me
No. This was an attempt to stop Terry Oldberg yet again disrupting a thread with his drivel.
But I have attempted to stop your thread destruction on three previous threads.
As I told you in one of the cases where I attempted to stop your encouragement of thread destruction, if you honestly want to read Oldberg twaddle then search WUWT for the several threads where he has been engaged – and refuted – by rgb@duke, Lord Moncton, me, and etc.. And if you want to “engage ” with him then you can do it elsewhere.
Your collaboration in the total destruction of the ‘dustbin’ thread was despicable.
I have answered you and give notice to all that I refuse to “engage” with you such as to enable your disruption of this thread.
Richard
– – – – – – – –
richardscourtney,
Thanks again for extending our engagement. It simply refreshes, on my part anyway.
You disagree with people, therefore you purposely interfere with them trying to have dialogs. I clearly understand that especially in the last week or so.
Yet that kind of activity on your part will never silence people with a reasonably well developed self-confidence. It only works on the timid. There is a relatively high scarcity of timid people @ur momisugly WUWT. Certainly those activities of yours will not in the least discourage me.
Try a different strategy perhaps, like encouraging open discussion. If I am not mistaken, that is the spirit of this venue.
John
Friends:
Anybody who has seen my posts on WUWT knows I welcome dialogue and despise trolls. Assertions from trolls to the contrary are only ‘red herrings’ suspended to obtain ‘bites’ in hope of deflecting a thread.
I refuse to bite and I trust others will refuse, too.
Richard
re: the vaulted theory of whether or not models can be put to the null hypothesis test. There are two kinds of people that often engage in a game of fallacious debate. Those that have convinced themselves they are right, and those that have convinced themselves that others are wrong. What boggles the mind is that it occurs here on a blog that values skepticism.
http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html.
However, though no ground has been gained by either side and I have yet to give 4 marks, it is quite fun to watch all the harrumphing so please continue.
– – – – – – –
Terry Oldberg,
Yes, some categorical info on ‘event’ would provide a reasonable context of your position.
Please.
John
A paper that was attempting to be published about how the trends were significantly cooling when the politicians we fear-mongering about warming being out of control… gets sacked by the gate keepers who are beholden to the politicians…. What could go wrong here…
Proof positive of that publication’s non-scientific stance..
Oh dear! It seems this thread has been invited to chase after others down Alice’s rabbit hole.
Richard
The number of pure believers over on Judith’s site is amazing. Lots of belittling and denier claims, and all from the faithful AGW believers touting disproven science (or should I say pseudo-science?) …
Bill H:
Thankyou for trying to drag this thread back to its subject.
At September 21, 2013 at 9:06 am you say
Yes! Indeed so.
As Tim Ball said in his above post at September 20, 2013 at 10:04 am
The issue of corruption of the peer review process goes the the heart of the damage done to all science by so-called ‘climate science’.
Richard
One of the most beautiful things about logic is that when done elegantly, one can substitute examples from other disciplines and run the logic to see if it still holds true. It is the supreme test of fallacious versus elegant debate tactics and is an excellent form of rebuttal.
Models are used in many other disciplines to mathematically mechanize observed phenomenon. And then tested again and again against new observations of the same phenomenon to see which ones adequately used the engineered mechanisms to mimic the actual mechanisms of new observations. Viewed in this way, the null hypothesis is that models will not mimic observations. Controlled tests are completed and data taken. The results will either 1) demonstrate that the engineered mechanisms do mimic the mechanisms of new observations thus rejecting the null hypothesis, or 2) the null hypothesis will be retained, models are not adequately engineered to mimic the apparently still not understood mechanisms of observed phenomenon. To be sure, model and observation correlation still does not equate to causation. But it is a step in the right direction if the model continues to mimic new observations.
The opponents of the current issue that seems to crop up in every thread are arguing over semantics, a side issue, and thus entwined in sidetracked debate that cannot decide the central issue. This form of debate nearly always ends in a stalemate.
Right. I don’t know what I stepped in here, and I’ve got no particular interest in finding out. I’m going to pass on this, thanks.
– – – – – – – –
Pamela Gray,
Thanks for your clearly stated essay.
The climate science researchers that have pursued GCMs for +20 years made a guess that the Earth-Atmosphere System (EAS) can be reasonably modeled for the purpose of generally describing climate realizations in the future.
I have yet to see any evidence of even moderately reasonable due diligence by model enthusiasts prior to embarking on the model quest as to whether the nature of the Earth-Atmosphere precludes modelability (is that even a real word?) per se.
Have you seen such due diligence prior to the GCM quest?
John
Richard Courtney, those of us who have been around for a while know that you are a bona fide , well informed commenter and someone who will argue long and ably in support of your views.
Don’t let these irritants get under your skin so much. To mix a metaphor, it will all come out in the wash!
Friends:
This thread is about “Gatekeeping at Geophysical Research Letters” (GRL).
It also has relevance to differences between the paper by Michaels et al. which GRL rejected and the later paper by Fyfe et al. which GRL accepted and published.
Asserted semantic differences between “projections”, “predictions” and events are totally irrelevant. And so are considerations of what climate modellers may or may not have considered decades ago. Introduction of these irrelevances are pure trolling intended to deflect the thread.
Please don’t feed the trolls.
Richard
johanna:
re your kind words at September 21, 2013 at 11:08 am .
Thankyou. I appreciate your kindness.
But there is a much more important issue here than my feelings.
Those of us who normally inhabit WUWT do so to learn. We exchange and debate ideas. Thus, we each learn especially when we discover that something we thought we knew was wrong.
But trolls operate with the deliberate intention of inhibiting or – if they can – preventing learning.
This they achieve by side-tracking a thread from its subject. The side-tracking has two effects
(a) those interested in the subject abandon the thread so discussion of the subject is curtailed
and
(b) those using the WUWT Search facility to find information are inhibited in finding what they want because threads don’t fully examine a subject.
Hence, it is important for trolling to be pointed out when it occurs in a thread so nobody is encouraged to feed the trolls.
Richard
A little humor on a Saturday.
To what extent does Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills resemble the current efforts on this thread at tilting at imaginary
trollsantagonistsnon-friends?Or to what extent does Anne McCaffrey’s fictional dragon world of Pern resemble the imaginary troll infested world here on this thread?
Get a grip.
John
John, the history of climate modeling is many decades long and a fascinating read! There has been plenty of work with very good examples of well-done pieces. I think work continues for several reasons. More than a few do so because it is a complex hard to model problem. And who wouldn’t want to be the one to discover the magic mix?!?!? While there are others who simply ride the anthropogenic CO2 gravy train I can easily dismiss them because, yes, my glass is always more than half full.
Richard you quack me up!
– – – – – – –
Pamela Gray,
Thanks for your quick response.
I guess I will need to due a search of research in the 1980s and early 1990s for critical analysis of show/stopper limits to modeling the Earth-Atmosphere System.
John
And thus the thread is lost. Sad, because it was important. But that is the intention of a troll infestation.
Richard
Nick,
You know, I’d probably have let this go if you hadn’t butchered my quote by omission.
I’m not explaining this to you Nick, because I expect you understand this better than I do. But in case anyone is puzzled, let me clarify.
Let’s say we’ve got a model that predicts a coin is weighted and will flip heads 66% of the time. For whatever reason we decide to accept this as our null hypothesis; in other words, this is what we will believe unless the tests prove otherwise.
We flip it, it comes up tails. We flip it again, it comes up tails again. So what? It doesn’t prove anything because the odds are still quite substantial with this small set of trials that this result could happen by chance if the null hypothesis is correct. It takes a certain minimum number of trials before the probability of not observing a trend by chance becomes significant.
Eventually, we have enough trials that we begin to reach significant confidence that the null hypothesis is incorrect, and that the coin is not flipping heads 66% of the time. When we first start reaching this result, subsequent flips of the coin can drag us back under the 95% confidence level relatively easily. This is what Nick is complaining about. The uncertainty Nick is trying to play up is due to the fact that we are just reaching the point where we have enough data to say the null hypothesis is invalid and that the models are falsified with statistical confidence. There’s no problem with the tests or methodology, the only problem is that we are just now reaching the point where we have enough observations to give us the confidence we normally associate with statistical certainty that the models are invalid.
I don’t know what Nick hopes to accomplish by playing this game, because at best this is a delaying tactic. It’s a way to pretend the tests falsifying the models are weak, rather than dwelling on the glaring point that the models are right on the hairy edge of being conclusively invalidated. We’ll reach the point soon enough that the ‘flicker’ will stop and the models will be falsified regardless of subsequent observations.
Sometimes I think Nick plays these games just to be obnoxious.
Mark Bofill:
You make a good point in your post at September 21, 2013 at 12:54 pm.
As you say
The paper by Michaels et al.(2101) was rejected by GRL it seems on spurious grounds concerning its statistical analysis. It predated the time when the models are “conclusively invalidated”.
The later paper by Fyfe et al.(2013) which GRL accepted and published used similar statistical analysis to obtain a similar result to the paper of Michaels et al.. And the paper of Fyfe et al.also predates the time when the models are “conclusively invalidated”.
Whether or not Nick Stokes were right, then there is a clear bias in the publishing criteria adopted by GRL. Clearly, WHO publishes and not WHAT is submitted is being adopted as a publication criterion.
It will soon be known if the models are – or are not – “conclusively invalidated” and in either case additional papers discussing that result can be anticipated. The blatant ‘gate keeping’ which has happened needs to be examined and publicised before the time when those papers can be written.
Richard
John, I like this one about the history of climate models but there are others out there. You can imagine the back story related to this. It is a dog eat dog environment that is as territorial as any pitbull. Too bad we don’t get that side of the story.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm