Fixing the Facts – By Steve McIntyre
Figure 1.4 of the Second Order Draft clearly showed the discrepancy between models and observations, though IPCC’s covering text reported otherwise. I discussed this in a post leading up to the IPCC Report, citing Ross McKitrick’s article in National Post and Reiner Grundmann’s post at Klimazweiberl. Needless to say, this diagram did not survive. Instead, IPCC replaced the damning (but accurate) diagram with a new diagram in which the inconsistency has been disappeared.
Here is Figure 1.4 of the Second Order Draft, showing post-AR4 observations outside the envelope of projections from the earlier IPCC assessment reports (see previous discussion here).
Figure 1. Second Order Draft Figure 1.4. Yellow arrows show digitization of cited Figure 10.26 of AR4.
Now here is the replacement graphic in the Approved Draft: this time, observed values are no longer outside the projection envelopes from the earlier reports. IPCC described it as follows:
Even though the projections from the models were never intended to be predictions over such a short time scale, the observations through 2012 generally fall within the projections made in all past assessments.
Figure 2. Approved Version Figure 1.4
So how’d the observations move from outside the envelope to insider the envelope? It will take a little time to reconstruct the movements of the pea.
Read more: http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/30/ipcc-disappears-the-discrepancy/
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KevinM says:
October 1, 2013 at 11:06 am
“The forward-projected error window must be referenced to the point selected at initial publication (and they could have picked any reasonable value they wanted to at that time). Adjusting the old prediction based on new information constitutes a new prediction. They have thrown out their old work because it embarrassed them.”
Absolutely, both in terms of the reality and in terms of the IPCC’s rules. The IPCC’s rules do not permit substituting a “corrected” chart for an earlier published chart. This is in accordance with standard practice of peer review.
http://news.yahoo.com/meteorologist-vows-never-to-fly-again-after-seeing-latest-climate-report-134014509.html
Eric Holthaus, meteorologist tweets:
“I realized, just now: This has to be the last flight I ever take. I’m committing right now to stop flying. It’s not worth the climate.”
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) September 27, 2013
And http://news.yahoo.com/climate-refugee-fighting-stay-zealand-081320424.html
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A man from one of the lowest-lying nations on Earth is trying to convince New Zealand judges that he’s a refugee — suffering not from persecution, but from climate change.
===
ONE nutcase meteo guy and THE climate refugee in New Zealand… that should fall well into the range of UN UNEP IPCC estimates on millions of climate refugees by 2012…/sarc
rogerknights says: October 1, 2013 at 9:55 am
Let’s call the current IPCC graphic the Spaghetti Monster chart.
____________________________
All hail to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the new IPCC deity.
I’ve heard he can improve your exam grades and make your poorly grandma better too, if you genuflect enough times.
Tom Rude,
From the article:
“Legal experts consider the man’s case a long shot…”
No kidding.
The guy went to New Zealand to escape the climate??
He should have gone to Nepal, instead. With runaway global warming the Himalayas should be as balmy as he is, and the altitude should protect him from those fast-rising oceans.
Mickey Mann is BAAAAACK…
http://news.yahoo.com/michael-mann-climate-change-deniers-must-stop-distorting-150312836.html;_ylt=A2KJjahQEUtSdDUAmbnQtDMD
“An urban legend seems to be circulating around the echo chamber of climate-change denial, including contrarian blogs and fringe right-wing news sites. The claim is that the IPCC has “dropped” or “trashed” the Hockey Stick conclusion regarding the unprecedented nature of recent warmth.”
“Conclusions about unprecedented recent warmth apply to the average temperature over the Northern Hemisphere. Individual regions typically depart substantially from the average. Thus, while most regions were cooler than present during the medieval era, some were as warm, or potentially even warmer, than the late-20th-century average. These regional anomalies result from changes in atmospheric wind patterns associated with phenomena such as El Niño and the so-called North Atlantic Oscillation”
[Now climate change does not include wind patterns… LOL]
“Don’t be fooled by the smoke and mirrors and the Rube Goldberg contraptions. The true take-home message of the latest IPCC report is crystal clear: Climate change is real and caused by humans, and it continues unabated. We will see far more dangerous and potentially irreversible impacts in the decades ahead if we do not choose to reduce global carbon emissions. There has never been a greater urgency to act than there is now.
The latest IPCC report is simply an exclamation mark on that already-clear conclusion.”
Mickey is looking for another fight… and his carbon footprint might look like someone’s shoeprint on his rear!
KR @October 1, 2013 at 9:37 am
You earlier wrote (@October 1, 2013 at 8:34 am):
I have not seen as many wrongheaded statements in a single comment in a long time. The purported “uncertainty estimate” is 90% not 95%, so the multiplier for the sd would be 1.645 not 2. As well, the gray area is supposed to account for “observational uncertainty and internal variability based on the HadCRUT4 temperature data”. The “model projection means” are not the “colored bands” as you state, but single curves centrally located within the bands (which are supposed to account for model variation). Willis (@October 1, 2013 at 9:44 am)has already pointed out that Steve did not “fail to mention” the presence of the gray patch and why it was there.
The individual who came up with the plot itself demonstrates a singular lack of statistical skills as well.
First, if the gray bands are to be scientifically meaningful, they should be applied to the four colored bands individually and not simply to the outside boundary of the overall colored figure. Notice how much wider the lower gray band is than the upper band around 1991 to accommodate the SAR projections. This incorrectly gives a free ride to the other scenarios whose correct outer gray portion would be much higher. There is no way to make a proper evaluation of the models and the observed temperatures and the graph is useless for that purpose.
Secondly, the width of the gray bands on either side of the color portions is approximately 0.25 C. Simple calculations using the annual crutem4 data shows that for the range of years 1990 to 2012, a 90% bound for the individual annual global temperatures (including ALL sources of error) is in the range +/- 0.103 to +/- 0.122 – less than half of what the gray region indicates.
Finally, uncertainty contributions from two independent sources are not additive, but combine as the square root of the sum of the squares of each source. This would imply that for this situation, the visible gray portion should start out at a width of the observed temperature uncertainty at the common starting point and decrease as the colored region increases. This does not seem to be the case in the plot itself.
You will also note that there are three observed temperature series plotted on the graph. These are enhanced by vertical bars extending above and below the set of points. What do you think the interpretation of those bars might be? Are the gray bands even necessary for the use claimed by the author of the report?
Who is telling us what to think? Who were the delegates meeting behind closed doors in Stockholm on the tax payers tab to work out the latest IPCC findings?
RomanM,
Thank you. KR comes here regularly trying to convince people that Down is Up, Black is White, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and “carbon” will cause runaway global warming. Good to see you set him straight.
I will listen to you and Steve McIntyre any day over the alarmist crowd, which has no measurable, testable facts; only assertions and conjectures. That nonsense has gone on for too long.
You can get the multi-model means from IPCC AR5 here.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/cmip5_indices.cgi?id=someone@somewhere
For example, here are the RCP 6.0 scenario (the most realistic) and RCP 4.5 (a low scenario) using the same baseline as Hadcrut4 is today. RCP 6.0 is at +0.79C in August 2013 and RCP 4.5 is also at +0.76C (they diverge later)
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/iglobal_tas_Amon_modmean_rcp60_00019611990a.txt
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/iglobal_tas_Amon_modmean_rcp45_00019611990a.txt
You can also get the multi-model means for IPCC AR4 from the IPCC here (they are in the 1980-1999 baseline so just add 0.184C to put it on the same baseline as HadCrut4 is today). Scenario A1B has an average of 0.69C in 2013.
http://www.ipcc-data.org/data/ar4_multimodel_globalmean_tas.txt
If I understand the techniques used in the graph.
Take your old predictions and scale them to the mean of the actual data.
Plot the predictions with an increased confidence interval.
The future predictions will be then safely within the confidence limits.
Climate science at its best.
It is also disingenuous for them to include all of the model outputs for all the different CO2 scenarios.
We know that the rate of increase in CO2 is close to the scenario for the A2 or A1B curves, having run unabated despite all the billions of dollars and euros squandered on the panic-stricken carbon strangulation schemes.
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/ar4-wg1/jpg/fig-10-4.jpg
The low end range of the model outputs, though, is applicable only to the ‘constant composition’ scenario, and has no business even being on the chart given what we know about CO2 concentrations.
Just noticed another alteration that affects the measured data and how it fits into the projected model graph. In the OLD GRAPH, all of the observed data points after the Super El Nino of 1998 do not top the El Nino Temp spike. In the new Spaghetti Graph, All the measured data points (observations) have been adjusted up so that the majority of the peaks that are post 1998 fall above the level of the 1998 el nino peak giving the appearance of a still gradual increase
Don’t let them get away with it!
Thanks GlynnMhor. So the models that fail least badly are not even applicable. Brilliant.
@RC Saumarez — Apparently you haven’t been paying attention to Pharma and Medicine, they do that stuff all the time. P > 0.05 is about all they need to make a statement. Science isn’t on the ropes just in climate science. Science is losing in lots of places. Gamesmanship plays a more important role in science than does falsifiability.
Deming’s guest post hits it pretty close. The warmists reading it won’t get it though.
I have the top 10,000 Stations plotted from BEST (top being defined as having the most observations) and available on line for anyone curious. http://www.bestkepttemps.com. BEST told me that 2 in 3 stations showed increasing temperatures. Port au Prince is definitely increasing. I can’t really say that about many others though.
Yes Bryan,
It certainly looks like they have adjusted the post 2002 numbers (I refuse to call it data)
They have created an upward slope in the observed points, and have coloured the upper ones black so they can easily be seen, The lower values are lighter in colour and hide quite well.
This upward trend after 2002 does NOT exist in the Hadcrud4 numbers, in fact it is negative.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend
Someone is creating a falsehood. !!!!!
Glynn, They aren’t really including the “no-increase” model results are they?.. seriously ????
That’s just a BLATANT LIE if they are !!
So they are fudging the numbers.
They are changing the graphs to give the impression that the models are correct.
What is new?
The MSM won’t report it.
They just slavishly publish the press releases of the UN, the IPCC, Greenpeace, the WWF and activists like Mann. Investigative journalism in the MSM has been dead for some time.
In the end Joe (and Joanne) average will only hear the message;
“See, we were right and it is even worse than we thought.”
Rud Istvan,
The graph that Spencer used showed satellite data compared to projections for the troposphere I believe whereas these are HADCRUT 4 compared to land/sea projections??
This presentation could be challenged as fraudulent, seriously criminally so. I’m not a climate scientist but have a technical high school engineering background with further work in implementing tax systems, law and accounting.
I’ve just discovered the AR4 grey bands are a presentation item only without any statistical significance. The preparers of these report have a duty of care that would be enforceable across most jurisdictions. One cannot write such high grade dense obscure technical material without implicitly claiming knowledge. Its hard at that level to say that they accidentally got it wrong or were misrepresented or careless. They must have put their minds to it and knowing that others were to act on it they had a duty to present it in way that was clear and without bias. Gross carelessness takes negligence into fraud so deliberative acts cannot find an excuse.
The grey bands gave a false significance (not a statistical one) that the data was within purported boundaries: without the grey there were no boundaries. The morphing of the grey now into a mess of spaghetti has to be taken as a deliberate endeavor to hide the fact that data doesn’t meet ‘projections’, whatever validity they may have. If the baseline of projections has shifted to overlap the data this is also a deliberate act.
The preparers of the report i.e. those named in it may in time be accountable personally in the criminal courts: their UN blanket may not be adequate covering.
Hmmmn.
Subtle, very subtle. Look again at the “positions” on the “X” (time, or year) axis presented in the AR5 graphic – You can’t really even call it a “graph” sinec that would imply it contains scientific data!
Notice that ALL of the AR4 “predictions” are “over-estimated” – well over top of the actual temperatures in the data between AR4 and AR5.
(No, they DON’T tell us what “date” those predictin are supposed to be valid against, BUT they DO place the prediction bands out above the apparent 2050, 2070, 2100 years of the “X” axis. So, a “failed” prediction that is too high by an order of magnitude is “placed” on the graph as if it were an accurate projection to the eye of a 2100 year’s prediction that draws the reader’s attention even further to the right so even the present spaghetti graphics look more accurate!
Oops, I copied this. I’m not referring to this post here bu the the latest AR5 installment. Apologies, Kev.
IPCC claims it ‘does not do science’ but I think that is unfair they do ‘science ‘ just very, very bad science .
Actually i am a bit disappointed with SM, Judith, Lucia etc because they always believed in AGW to some extent or did not want to discuss it much as a subject whether it existed or not. Now it seems they are really realizing how they have been had by actually paying attention to the alarmists. It seems now that they are actually getting angry (re JC IPCC needs to be terminated) ect. I am proud of the fact that for years we deniers have been shouting from the roof that this is a complete scam. Anyway none of the HADCRUT, GISS etc data is valid it has all been manipulated i dont know why they keep using it. Its just another IPCC trap. It vexes me as Marcus Aureliuse’s son Domitian said in the film GLADIATOR hahahaha
Bottom line is lukewarmers are now becoming skeptical even of lukewarming .