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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The poem “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson, could almost be invoked as a description of the terrified flight of the post-normal scientist, AGW etc,. fleeing from a figurative Karl Popper and the inescapable, relentless law of testing and falsification of scientific hypothesis:
The AGW scientist fleeing from Karl Popper:
I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days ;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind ; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes, I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears.
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase.
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat — and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
”All ‘things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
Francis Thompson (The hound of heaven)
So is anyone here dumb enough to invest money with Nathan Myrvold?
“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.” …
“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”
They thought they were doing a study on climate but they did a study of group thinking.
They confuse the degree of variation in the preconceived ideas programmed into the models with scientific “uncertainty” in the results.
The “high degree of consensus” that goes into the way models are written is the cause of the similarity in “basic outlook”.
This has NOTHING to do with uncertainty.
Considering the models involved have been proven to be crap all subsequent results can only be more crap.
Mike Borgelt says:
“So is anyone here dumb enough to invest money with Nathan Myrvold?”
Let’s hope not. Myrvold is one of those guys who was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. He got in on the ground floor at Microsoft, made his multi-millions, and now demonstrates that even with enough money, he cannot produce credible results.
The public tends to worship luck. In Myrvold’s case, luck is not enough to overcome his model’s failure.
If the heat mostly goes into the oceans and gets hugely diluted thereby, it won’t (much) melt ice or affect the climate, so what’s the worry?
Terry Oldberg says:
September 30, 2013 at 8:39 pm
If you’re going to play that card, please explain how the models make any actionable claims. In other words, either the models are representative of the real world or they are not. Why should we care if some virtual, exists-only-in-the-imagination-of-the-models world is going to heat up, trip over a tipping point and turn into Venus?
@ur momisugly Tatonka Chesli, thanks for the Popper mention. I’ll chase down your allusions and mention of Francis Thompson.
Warming hiding in the future is merely more ADHOCKERY. Adhockery impeaches.
Barry says:
“The 95% confidence value does not refer to model projections, it’s about anthropogenic contribution to global warming since the middle of last century.”
In other words: we are sure we are right, but we aren’t sure what we are sure about.
Oh my! Thank you very much – just on first assay! I’m reading Popper’s ‘Open Society’. J. R. R. Tolkien provides me one of the images of ‘society’, that I consider in progressivism/progress from what?
Louis says:
“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.”
There was one 65 million years ago when the Chicxulub impact heated the CO2 out of many thousands of cubic kilometers of carbonate rock in a few seconds. Anyone interested in the effect of sudden increases of CO2 should study that interval. However this requires strenuous fieldwork and tedious analysis, research in short, which does not appeal at all to modern post-normal scientists who prefer playing computer games.
If a bunch of warming is released over 100 years after a warming event, when will the extra heat from the end of the Little Ice Age reappear? Have they detected massive volumes of warm water down there? Or did the heat reappear already, in 1976?
We already know the ice core data shows that CO2 concentrations follows the warming (it warms up first, then the CO2 goes up). Since we know CO2 drives warming, we there must conclude that future CO2 levels are transporting the greenhouse effect into the past. Therefore, this is entirely possible.
I’m not sure if the title is tongue-in-cheek, but I think what is meant is that if you take a model and do a step change in CO2 concentration in one time step to the next then one simulation takes 10 (virtual) years to adjust to the new situation and another much longer, although the end state is more or less the same for most models. That doesn’t mean that the heat is hiding in the future.
However, finding “a fairly high degree of consensus” between models obviously means nothing except that most likely all of them are flawed.
As far as I can see all this is saying that heat is distributed among several compartments with different time constants. Since this is almost inevitable in a system that conatains air, liquid and ice, the whole thing seems completely tivial.
Terry Oldberg says: @ur momisugly September 30, 2013 at 8:39 pm
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.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You keep repeating that in thread after thread after thread and you keep getting told you are WRONG with quotes directly from the IPCC by Richard S. Courtney.
For those who are new, the models do if/then type ‘projections’ IF there is no change in humanities CO2 output THEN the models PREDICT an increase in temperature of X. Also the IPCC DOES use the actual word prediction and not just the word projection in earlier reports as Courtney has shown on several occasions.
To add insult to injury it is Ged Davis, Shell Oil Vice President, who WROTE the if/then scenarios for the IPCC.
You can read them in the climategate e-mail HERE.
More models. Here’s what George E. P. Box said about them:
“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful. ”
“Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary, following William of Occam, he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.
“One important idea is that science is a means whereby learning is achieved, not by mere theoretical speculation on the one hand, nor by the undirected accumulation of practical facts on the other, but rather by a motivated iteration between theory and practice. “
HURRY!—-HURRY!—–HURRY!
–
–
Order your Double Acting CO2! today!
–
Twice the WARMTH of regular CO2!
–
Be the first on your block to use Double Acting CO2!
–
–
Pfft! This research has scam as the message, not science.
I do wonder. Last week a new troll (to me), on WUWT was stating that new research was due any time that would ‘prove’ CO2 as evil and that we would regret our skepticism. He (it?) certainly isn’t worth searching for as neither this research or his message are worth a gnats time.
I don’t see why everyone’s so upset. After all, “It’s science”.
OK. I’ll ask.
So, if “step changes” in CO2 are what the models “try to” use to determine/predict/project (got to keep Oldberg happy here), but require several decades to “re-stabilize” before future temperatures are correct ….. How are the current models back-casting the actual slow month-by-month changes in CIO2 that have actually happened?
Rather, what I read over-and-over again is that the model conditions are “set” from a zero-zero baseline, and the models are run over thousands of iterations to stabilize (apparently to some acceptable and stable worldwide “climate” of simulated ice, simulated ocean currents, simulated air flows and wind flows, global temperatures, and global (preset) cloud albedoes) and preset land-and-ocean detail mapping; then CO2 is “stepped” to a new value and the difference from the previous conditions are plotted. Rinse, wash, repeat for a new trial. Yet we have NEVER been shown that simulated “step 0” original worldwide global “climate” that is supposedly the baseline for telling us what the “change in climate:’ will be in year +1, year + 2, year + 3, … year + 1000
However, should not each of the 23 GC Models be able to return to 1890’s actual atmosphere conditions (CO2, assumed air temperature anomalies over the global for 1890, actual global temperatures, assumed arctic and antarctic ice extents, assumed aerosols, and known volcanoes fro 1890 through 2013. Then RUN the actual slow CO2 increase from 1950 through 2013. Show us the result. No “stabilization, no short 10 year run. A single 120 year run against known known volcanoes and known CO2 increases.
The result has never been plotted. Apparently, this simple long-term test against reality has never been done successfully.
All they may have demonstrated is that model results are all over the place and pretty much useless for predicting … er, projecting anything of value.
What is the proposed real worldl physical mechanism for such a purported long range delay in the effect of CO2 on any warming?
AndrewmHarding
The specific heat capacity for sea water is 3,900 joules per kilogram-kelvin
source: http://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/source/s/p/specific%20heat%20capacity/source.html#.UksDO2Dn8eE
The specific heat capacity for air with 60% humidity is 1.04 joules per kilogram-kelvin
source: http://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/source/s/p/specific%20heat%20capacity/source.html#.UksDO2Dn8eE
the reason more heat energy goes into the oceans than the air is because the oceans take more heat to warm and if they are colder then more heat energy goes into them.
” If we continue increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations with emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas, the Earth will continue to get hotter.”
So the world cannot cool down then???
The weather, the weather, everyone knows about, never does a thing about…….Yes, that warmth is hiding in the oceans causing the Arctic ice to expand. 😉
jai mitchell says:
“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.”
That being the case, explain why there is NO ocean warming.
The chart above just deconstructed your entire belief system. I know you are incapable of seeing it that way, because your mind is closed. You are a Believer; you don’t need facts.
There is no acceleration of natural ocean warming. In fact, within 2-sigma error bands, there is no ocean warming at all. Real time SST shows that to be the case, too.
What would it take to make the scales fall from your eyes? A miracle?
=====================================
[PS: Thanx, Obama. <— this is your fault.]