From the Carnegie Institution and the mind of Ken Caldeira, comes this “back to the future” style impossible to verify prediction (at least impossible now). Of course, in model-world and Hollywood, anything is provable possible.
Climate change: Fast out of the gate, slow to the finish the gate
Washington, D.C.— A great deal of research has focused on the amount of global warming resulting from increased greenhouse gas concentrations. But there has been relatively little study of the pace of the change following these increases. A new study by Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira and Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures concludes that about half of the warming occurs within the first 10 years after an instantaneous step increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, but about one-quarter of the warming occurs more than a century after the step increase. Their work is published in Environmental Research Letters.
The study was the result of an unusual collaboration of a climate scientist, Ken Caldeira, who contributed to the recently published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and Nathan Myhrvold, the founder and CEO of a technology corporation, Intellectual Ventures LLC. It is the third paper on which they have collaborated
The study brings together results from the majority of the world’s leading climate models. Caldeira and Myhrvold analyzed more than 50 climate simulations, which were performed using 20 different climate models for the Climate Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5).
They found a fairly high degree of consensus on the general character of the pace of climate change. In response to an instantaneous increase in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is fast out of the starting gate but then slows down, and takes a long time to approach the finish line.
There is substantial quantitative disagreement among climate models, however. For example, one model reaches 38 percent of the maximum warming in the first decade after a step increase in CO2 concentration, while another model reaches 61 percent of the maximum warming in this time period. Similarly, one model reaches only 60 percent of maximum warming in the first century after the step increase, while another achieves 86 percent of maximum warming during this interval.
There is also substantial uncertainty in the ultimate amount of warming that would result from any given increase in atmospheric CO2 content. The most sensitive model predicts more than twice as much warming as the least-sensitive model.
Uncertainty in the amount of warming combines with uncertainty in the pace of warming. From an instantaneous doubling of atmospheric CO2 content from the pre-industrial base level, some models would project 2°C (3.6°F) of global warming in less than a decade while others would project that it would take more than a century to achieve that much warming.
“While there is substantial uncertainty in both the pace of change and the ultimate amounts of warming following an increase in greenhouse gas concentration,” Caldeira said, “there is little uncertainty in the basic outlook. If we continue increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations with emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas, the Earth will continue to get hotter. If we want the Earth to stop getting hotter, we have to stop building things with smokestacks and tailpipes that emit CO2 into the atmosphere.”
The authors acknowledge the World Climate Research Program’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP.
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And, Thingodonta, if your big brother turned out to be as decent a person as you are (per your WUWT posts), then, he has paid for that many times over in Big-sibling Guilt; I know — I have it myself. There’s a pretty good cure, though, (I say this in case any other eldest kids might find this helpful): say to yourself, “You were just a little kid, too.” (Repeat) — It works, sorta… .
Since when is a comparison of model variations a “study” of anything other than variation in model programming and parameter selection?
So they found that a step function in a setting to a computer program that iterates has a long tail of ‘feedback’ as the step function slowly decays through the iterations. OK….
For n=1 to 100
do
HeatAddedYear(n+1)=0.98*HeatAddedYear(n);
doend
Something like that is somewhere in the code. Thanks for pointing it out. A source listing with the line in question in bold would have been more effective.
What has it to do with actual weather, climate, or any reality? Nothing at all. Just a choice by some programmer. And what they found is that some folk used 0.98, while other used 0.97 and some used 0.95 and…
And they call themselves scientists…
Paper is available at http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034039/article
It is obvious that the heat is being transported back and forth via a wormhole to a parallel universe
Well, goodness me. This means that there are at least two poles in the feedback equations governing the response to a step increase in CO2. Who would have thought that something so simple as the earth would stretch to a second order equation????!!!!
From the description this sounds like a public opinion poll conducted from a population of climate models. I can hardly wait for the next study to see how many of them can tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab.
“… heat is being transported back and forth via a wormhole …”
Only when nRT/P >= 88 mph. Otherwise it’s Libyan terrorists all the way down.
The IPCC fools have truly backed themselves into a corner from which there is no escape. There is no heat hiding in the oceans. Down welling LWIR slowing the cooling of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool is a physical impossibility.
Back in 2011 Willis here at WUWT claimed that based on IR emissivity of liquid water it should absorb IR at the same frequency range and this could slow its cooling rate. However, I showed by empirical experiment that incident IR does not penetrate the skin evaporation layer of liquid water and has no significant effect on the cooling rate of water below this. If a film of LDPE plastic is floated on the surface of the test samples, allowing radiative and conductive exchange while blocking evaporation, then incident IR does slow the cooling rate. The original 2011 experiment can be seen here –
http://i47.tinypic.com/694203.jpg
A cleaner version for other readers to build and run themselves can be seen here –
http://i42.tinypic.com/2h6rsoz.jpg
Basically the claims of climate pseudo scientists that the oceans would “freeze over” without downwelling LWIR are pure BS. Their further claims that missing heat has entered the oceans via LWIR are simply more of the same, only fresher and still steaming.
This is but one of the critical mistakes in both the GHE and AGW hypotheses. The mistake that invalidates both hypotheses is that in the “basic physics” of the “settled science” the pseudo scientists failed to increase the speed of tropospheric convective circulation for increasing concentrations of radiative gases. This circulation governs the speed of mechanical energy transport from the surface. This critical error is recorded for all time on the Internet. It cannot be erased. A doubling of CO2 will not create 1.2C of warming. The NET effect of radiative gases in our atmosphere is cooling at all concentrations above 0.0ppm.
AGW is a physical impossibility, but there is a real carbon catastrophe coming. The reputations of every pseudo scientist, activist, journalist or politician that sought to promote or profit by this inane hoax are about to be reduced to ashes. The same is true for the UN and the EUSSR parliament.
Take a 1 liter of 14.5 C water and ad 1400 liter of 4 C water, how much temperature increase, ?
Are they trying to get us to wait 100 years?
Why are any of us waiting at all? Haven’t we waited enough? When are we going to pull the plug on this con and haul these animals into a court room set up specially for the purpose? [Oh, and humble apologies to all animals.]
I am still waiting for the punchline, Anthony…
Actually there is evidence AGAINST any missing heat. N.G. Loeb et al, Nature Geoscience 2012, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1375 find that the heat uptake by the oceans as measured by ARGO and earlier ship bathythermometers is pretty much exactly equal to the imbalance in outgoing radiation as measured by satellites over the past 20 years. So missing heat will not only need to be missing, it may even violate the First Law of Thermodynamics, having materialized wraithlike from nothing.
Also very interesting is that the measureed imbalance is only 0.5 watt/square-meter, far less than the computed 2.3 watt/square-meter we are supposed to have jacked into the atmosphere. This means that future atmospheric global warming from this imbalance will be about 0.4 deg C if the climate sensitivity is 3 degrees for doubling (3.7 watt/square-meter) or 0.1 deg C if the sensitivity is 1 degree for doubling. I would bet on the latter.
Ah, look at what you can learn by just looking at the data without any dramatic rescue expedition for the models.
Given the various suggestions floating about regarding large scale geoengineering projects to cool the climate would it not be prudent to commence a UN committee to eliminate the Moon. It has been shown that in the long-term equilibrium the strength of the thermohaline circulation in models depends on the turbulent mixing coefficient (Bryan, F.1987), and that the energy required for this turbulent mixing comes to a large extent from the Moon via tidal currents (Wunsch, C. 2000).
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/thc_fact_sheet.html
This could be enough to shut the THC down and initiate global cooling?
Just a thought.
/sarc
Check! Well, at least the smokestacks. Most newer power stations vent their flue gases though the cooling towers.
🙂
Contrary to Anthony Watts’s claim the IPCC climate models do not make predictions. They do make projections. Unlike a prediction, a projection makes no falsifiable claim.
This was paid for by a company called “Intellectual Ventures” sounds like an evil oil company to me.
Even if they aren’t an evil oil company the idea of comparing models to models make no sense.
As a kid I had model airplanes, by studying them it would be easy to to conclude that no airplanes are longer than 12 inches.
This is a great piece of research. Tell them we’ll pay them in the future for it. Maybe they can use their models to predict when the check’s coming.
Is the notion of drawn-out response to forcing new to anyone? This is decades-old understanding, and has been a feature of many conversations on this site. There has always been uncertainty about the temporal evolution of climate change. Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (the so-called Charney sensitivity) is reckoned to be the response to warming after 30 or 40 years or longer, owing to the slow feedbacks of the deeper ocean. (It does not include longer processes like melting ice sheets and poleward migration of flora species, which produces additional surface temperature change on the scale of centuries to milennia) There is a spread amongst models in ECS response time, some faster, some slower. In virtually all models, most of the warming poccurs in the first 30 – 40 years. There have been plenty of papers pointing out longevity of various response times, eg:
http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/PapersIDAGsubtask1.3/Knutti_nature08.pdf (2008)
Papers that attempt to take into account more feedbacks have similar values for the short-term, and, obviously, longer values for the long-term, eg;
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf (2008)
This new study compares different model types (1 dimensional, 2-box, state of the art GCMS) and quantifies the spread for ‘fast-feedback’ ECS. The response times to different feedabcksare not linear (so be wary of drawing conclusions thus). The focus and results aren’t novel to anyone who is conversant with climate modeling, but the quantification is a useful frame for future study, which the paper recommends.
I don’t see anything majorly new here. Just the climate science community critiquing models in order to improve them – business as usual.
Why do we still call them smokestacks when there is no longer any smoke except in photo shopped pictures?
Seems to me that there is some simple physics being overlooked here. The thermal time constant (for surface temperatures) of the oceans is somewhere near a dozen years and three time constants will get about 95% compliance with step change conditions.
So they ran 50 simulations using 20 different “leading” climate models then they wrote this up as a study as though it was actually relevant to something.
No data was collected or analyzed. Exactly what does this have to do with science?
“The study brings together results from the majority of the world’s leading climate models. Caldeira and Myhrvold analyzed more than 50 climate simulations, which were performed using 20 different climate models…”
Climate models, climate simulations and more climate models. I think the past warming trend might have been from all the CPU cycles used to generate models and simulations and now study the simulations of the models modeling the simulators. The “consensus” came from studying the studies. I think something is getting lost, like, oh, um, maybe studying the CLIMATE?
Good on Caldeira for lecturing us about smoke stacks and tail pipes. I’m sure that he made the point to his co-researcher, Nathan Myhrvold. You know, the guy with the mansion on the lake with the private pool, the private dock, and, I kid you not, a life size replica of a T-Rex:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_SexyGCV13kU/S4Knb85wGqI/AAAAAAAAAD0/q1k_Rm7sp-I/s1600-h/580+c+P1040431.JPG
The guy has the carbon footprint of a small town.
In a word… “garbage”, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you give it a French pronunciation; a long drawn-out second syllable.
More effin’ models!
Ric Werme says: September 30, 2013 at 5:48 pm BTW, if the name is familiar:
Abuse of the patent system has a long and ignoble (Ig Nobel?) history back to Boulton & Watt at least with those who were merely first seeking to stifle later innovation and development.