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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Actual temperatures don’t match projections from IPCC 4 models because those models didn’t reflect heat going into the deep ocean. The IPCC 5 models also don’t reflect heat going into the deep ocean, yet we’re 95% certain that they are correct. Huh?
That is what is so amazing. The amount of heat in the oceans does not account for the deficit in the models scenarios, and the rate of change is not increasing as the “its hiding in the oceans” requires for plausability. If the oceans are taking all this heat, why isnt the amount of heat in the increasing at an huge rate? See Figure 1. Where is the rate change to account for this?
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Simple, all the hot air is actually coming from the CO2 alarmists. The rise in temps corresponds to when they began pontificating.
Hope their mothers don’t catch them playing with their models like that, least not before they go blind.
Bill Illis says:
September 30, 2013 at 5:40 pm
Do you know where the “90% of the warming is going into the oceans” came from?
It came from Church and White 2011
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I thought it was Travesty Trenberth who came up with that …. well at least that half of his brain (sic) that wasn’t pushing roving atmospheric hot spots creating heatwaves at random.
As someone posted recently, the oceans warm the atmosphere and now, apparently, the atmosphere warms the oceans too. Given that, how is it possible that anyone could doubt runaway global warming ??
Carbon dioxide creates perpetual motion machine. What can’t it do ?
If you do “science” based on how you feel about it,
or, as with AGW, pure speculation about human CO2,
you — will — crash.
Trust the data.
Given how utterly CRASHED their models are v. a v. reality,
it is clear: climate model programmers are suffering from
Desired Outcome Disorientation
GCM programmer: “….. DANG! Wrong again!!! ….. uh………. oh, where, oh, where, oh, where is that HEAT??!! It’s not in the troposphere…. it’s not at the North Pole…… it’s not inside a hurricane…… it’s not in outer space……. it’s not in my electric car’s heater……….. (I’d say it’s inside a volcano, but Joe said not to bother, it won’t work)………it must be…………. IN THE DEEP, the very, very, deepest, deep, OCEANS!
Ah. Saved the day……. uh, oh. We’re coming under heavy fire from WUWT’s big guns………. ooooooo, noooooooo. (picks up phone) “Hi, Mr. Myrh? We need some damage control over here. Can you put out some flak, something about how models are neat and super reliable, and… oh, yeah, be sure to say something about ‘a quarter,’…….. You want HOW MUCH?! … Well, okay. Pouch Hahree said ‘whatever it takes,’……….What? Oh, sure, I’ll e mail you 20 or so model runs, just glance at them, I’ll tell you what to write……. You can say (cough) you ‘studied’ them…….. .
In the future, they’ll be looking for the “missing heat” under miles of glacial ice.
They won’t recognize the problem after glaciers consume their office windows.
And still they’ll look.
“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.”
Wait a second…the Earth has stopped getting hotter and we still build smoke stacks and tail pipes. I guess those clever scientists were so busy looking into their models they forgot to look out the window.
Seriously. models are nothing more than a mathematical representation of a theory. They help us determine the strength of that theory by crunching a bunch of numbers to get results that we can compare to observations. If the results don’t match, the theory is weak. Right now, the results don’t match.
Is there a modeler out their who wants to have results that match observations? Cut the assumed sensitivity of CO2 by 66% (or simply remove the positive feedbacks) and add in a 60 year natural, warming/cooling cycle (tied to the PDO) that has a magnitude twice as great as that produced by the current increase in CO2. (If CO2 is producing warming of 0.08/decade, the warm phase will produce warming of 0.24/decade. The cool phase will produce cooling of 0.08/decade, for a net warming of about half a degree/60 year cycle) Next, add in an 800-900 year natural cycle of warming/cooling with a magnitude of about 2 degrees C. (Not sure why it is there, but it is, so add it to the model.) Make the transition from the warm phase to the cool phase sometime in this Century. Don’t forget to taper off the impact of CO2 as concentrations increase, due to its logarithmic impact, and remove the arbitrary aerosol equations found in the current models. You no longer need them to match up with the historical record. Then watch the observations line up with model output decade after decade, until the Holocene ends.
Of course, this model will not project any significant warming for at least 500 years, so after you publish your results, you will be unemployed. But at least you will have the satisfaction of being correct.
I decided to find out a little bit about our dear Ken Caldeira. Aside from being a former IPCC participant, and doing the obligatory climate science post doc docking at Penn State, it appears Ken old boy does an absolutely first place job at coming up with scientificky analogies. I found out over at:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/26/2684021/ken-caldeira-keystone-xl-climate-action/
that in 2009 Ken Caldeira wrote to Climate Progress to educate us with his views on CO2:
‘I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies…. It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.’
The moment I completed letting my eyeballs digest the foregoing Caldeiriation I thought to myself, wow, what brilliance! Imagine the CO2 molecule as a little old lady mugger. What could possibly be more appropriate. Think of the scientific similarities between breathing, heating one’s home, and…mugging little old ladies. It’s one of those things that’s just so very obvious that only a true genius could’ve seen it. And, this is why I have complete faith in his prognosis that, while we don’t see CO2 induced warming now, we will see it in the future. It’s simple, there must be a dearth of little old ladies to mug right now. But we’re all getting older, and soon half of the baby boomers will be turning into little old ladies. Then that opportunistic, thuggish CO2 will start the mugging. That’s why they call that hot weather, ‘muggy’. And Ken Caldeira knew it all along! What a mind! What flabbergasting intellect! And, I feel really good now, knowing that the destruction of the world’s economic system is based on something so concrete I never allowed myself to see it before.
Calamity Caldeira and Travesty Trenberth – dumb and dumber ??
“Muggy” — lol, Tom J — great writing.
Very nice summary, Jim Clarke — you would WIN at the science fair, until…. old man Poucharee stomped all over your laptop (with your great model in it) so his little kid could win with his pathetic tinker toy contraption.
Rocky Road (LOVE that flavor!) — you are so right. “That’s not ice. That’s just a figment of my imagination… .”
The 95% confidence value does not refer to model projections, it’s about anthropogenic contribution to global warming since the middle of last century.
Phil, lol — yes! And the DUMBEST is………….. hm….. so MANY choices….. ol’ mister millions of degrees at the earth’s core Gore? ….. mister “settled science” cook (was it he who gets credit for that one?) …. WELL, ANYWAY. They can all share it with each claiming he (or she) is “the” D.U.M. Best (sssh, don’t tell them what that means — tell them it stands for: Doctor uv Modeling, Best) winner for 2013.
Jquip says:
September 30, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Though, if we’re interested in a more targeted solution we can combat both the direct destruction of the planet as well as the two-fer that ensues from obesity by consideration of sin-taxes levied McDonald’s as well as all other convenient food outlets that sell directly to consumers. This option is desirable in that it develops a narrowly tailored planetary use-tax. This mechanism is compassionately progressive in that the impoverished hardly consume food products to begin with. The less impoverished are able to self-tailor their asceticism to offset their planetary burdens. And the rich can purchase indulgences against their profligacy to mitigate the harm they cause by funding vegetarian outreach and starvation education programs.
——————————————————————————–
……… brilliant.
I think that the next generation may have a bit of a problem with planetary use-taxes, and that they’re going to make it someone else’s problem.
Bill Illis said,
Completely ignoring the 78% of the other areas in the chart.
The energy in the graphic that you showed that is being reflected back into space (ozone and volcanic (cyan)) and the heat energy that radiates back out into space (yellow) shouldn’t be counted as “warming” of the earth.
Only the warming that is happening in the oceans, the air and the phase change of solids to liquid or liquids to vapor count as energy that is deposited into the earth and causing warming. Of this energy 92% goes into the oceans and only about 2.5% goes into the air that is around us.
Since the air around us has such a small ability to store heat than water does, if it was the other way around (92% going into the air) we would all be dead now, as the temperature would be 30 degrees warmer (celsius) than it was in 1880.
MJ says:
The IPCC and related alarmists have acknowledged the lack of global warming over the last 16 years, and they have acknowledged the fact that they can’t agree that the CO2 sensitivity factor used in computer models to predict run-away global warming is the correct factor. All this is admitted in the UN’s IPCC summary report albeit the admission about the disagreement is in a foot note. It should have been in headlines, because it is absolutely the only basis for the hypothesis that CO2 causes significant global warming, a monument of conjecture.
Instead, the politically driven IPCC summary touts 2 things;
1) It raised it’s confidence level from 90% sure to 95% sure that CO2 causes global warming!
2) It also raised the hypothesis that the missing heat in the 16 year “pause” in global warming may be found in the deep ocean. Of course, there are no measurements to show that it’s there, just as there are no measurements to show that the heat is accumulating in the troposphere as a “greenhouse” effect. However, the main-stream media likes the idea because their reputations are endangered, hanging on the proverbial limb.
I love the following comment posted by MJ.
MJ says;
“Sounds like to me the heat is hiding in the models.”
(assuming and hoping you are now sound asleep)
Good morning, Anthony! #(:))
For you, our battle-weary hero,
Sometimes a little perspective can help give us a second wind.
Take care of yourself. The world needs you.
Yours with admiration,
Janice
Thanks Janice
“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.”
Hate to say it but someone’s going to have to inform Ken Caldeira he’ll have to take some of those criticisms right to Nature’s (and by complicity, the Earth’s) very own doorstep. Didn’t Nature design us humans with our very own tailpipes? And it’s a good thing it did too because… Ok, I won’t write anything more.
Intellectual Ventures appears to be an oxymoron.
Jai, temperature and heat energy are not one and the same! If someone told me I would get hit by objects at 800 Celsius I would be dead if I was caught in a flow of magma, but unharmed if it was a stream of superheated iron particles from a grinding wheel.
The models are not working, the Met Office cannot predict the weather due to these models. If I want to know what the weather is going to do today, I look out of the window and consult my weather station, if I want more detail I look at stills from the weather satellite. BBQ summers, mild winters, they could not have got it more wrong if they had tried!
Heat has not “disappeared” into the oceans, it just cannot happen, the models are wrong, end of!
The more I read about the opinions of these “experts” the more I realise it is not science it is dogma with a quasi-religious zeal!
You’re welcome, A-th-y. (hope he’s NOW sound asleep)
The horrible side of this piece of junk science is that it has been ‘published’ . It also wasted resources that could have been used to support some honest research. This aspect of the warmest movement is often overlooked. They are the pseudo science version of the court jesters.
Jim Clarke said ;
“…the warm phase will produce warming of 0.24/decade. The cool phase will produce cooling of 0.08/decade, for a net warming of about half a degree/60 year cycle) Next, add in an 800-900 year natural cycle of warming/cooling with a magnitude of about 2 degrees C. (Not sure why it is there, but it is, so add it to the model.) Make the transition from the warm phase to the cool phase sometime in this Century.Then watch the observations line up with model output decade after decade, until the Holocene ends.”
Sounds very interesting got any graphs for that ?
Got any temperature projections for the next 20 years, or to 2100 or even beyond, when and at what temperature does the curve bottom out ?
How about more explicitly… “the only place concentrated heat can hide in this massive world is in a model or a climatologist’s fantasy” (it’s an entropy thing) After mixing, never to show its face again except remotely in the far insignificant digits of a temperature that we can not even measure or detect that fine. Now I’d agree to that. Wish everyone would stop using such wishy-washy words…. well… like the I.P.C.C.. Trenberth’s “hiding” heat, phooey. Returning one day from its thermal grave, phooey. And if they think they can measure the temperature of the Earth’s entire ocean’s mass to 0.01°C or even 0.1°C as I have read, phooey on that too.
Bet he wishes he never opened his mouth on that topic. Do these climatologist’s not have to take the courses to understand the real physical world?
Reading this fiction brings up more questions than answers. For example, what do they mean by an “instantaneous step increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration”? I thought the increases in CO2 have been fairly gradual and steady over several decades. I’m not aware of any instantaneous step increases. And if half the warming takes place in the first ten years, why has there been no warming at all for the past 15 years while CO2 continues to increase? Did the old CO2 molecules forget to tell the new guys they had to work for 10 years before they could take a break?
Just how do CO2 molecules coordinate their timing anyway? Do they take turns? I guess one wakes up the other and says, “I just spent 20 years warming up the atmosphere. Now it’s your turn to spend the next 20 years warming up the deep ocean while I take a siesta.” CO2 seems to possess a kind of devious intelligence capable of orchestrating every evil known to mankind, from generating killer storms to fungi invasions. Maybe we should be looking for ways to appease the CO2 Gods so they will stop sending plagues down upon us. Oh wait, that is what the warmists have been trying to get us to do all along — to sacrifice humans to Gaia.