On the Futility of Long-Range Numerical Climate Prediction

William M. Gray, Ph.D. … is professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Colorado State University
——————
Thanks to Dr Gray! I hope he doesn’t lose his job for daring to speak such heresy though.

There is no physical way that an atmospheric doubling of the very small amount of background CO2 gas would ever be able to bring about such large global temperature increases.
My take on CO2 is that there is no actual evidence that CO2 does… anything!
Well, beyond being plant food. What the warmists have is a theoretical model on CO2, but zero empirical evidence supporting their model. The Economist reported: “The mismatch between rising greenhouse gas emissions and not-rising temperatures [15 year ‘pause’] is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now.” And now, as time has unfolded, ALL the climate models have failed… miserably. CO2 has not been doing of late what it was supposed to do.
But it’s not just the last 15 years, it’s … throughout history.
First, take a look at this key 3 1/2 minute video that exposes the false claims of Al Gore on CO2. For years people have just gone along and accepted as fact the disingenuous deceptions of Gore and the ipcc on CO2. To counter this we need to look more closely at the evidence.
Going back hundreds of thousands of years we can see in ice core samples that temperatures rise or fall, and then CO2 follows. Changes in CO2 result as an effect of temperature change. Yet there is no evidence at all that CO2 is also a cause of temperature change. What the Chicken Littles want us to believe is that CO2 could be both a cause and an effect of temperature change. Sure, that’s possible (if improbable), but the fact is that there’s no evidence for that. None.
And if we go back even further, hundreds of millions of years, we again see no evidence that CO2 affected temperatures. From Larry Bell: “Fossil records reveal that atmospheric CO2 levels around 600 million years ago were about 7,000 parts per million (ppm), compared with 379 ppm in 2005. Then approximately 480 million years ago those levels gradually dropped to 4,000 ppm over about 100 million years, while average temperatures remained at a steady 72 degrees. They then jumped rapidly to 4,500 ppm and guess what! Temperatures dove to an estimated average similar to today, even though the CO2 level was around twelve times higher than now. Yes, as CO2 went up, temperatures plummeted.” Even ice ages occurred at these high CO2 levels!
And looking at recent history, it’s the same thing, no evidence on CO2! Since 1850 or so we have been recovering from the Little Ice Age with mild warming (we have had only 0.7°C of warming). Now look at this woodfortrees graph. What we see is a near identical rate of temperature change during the first (low CO2) and second half (high CO2) of the 20th century. In recent times, with much higher CO2, the rate of temperature change is practically the same as before. Where is the signal for CO2? CO2 appears to be doing nothing, zilch. C3 presents more on this here.
If we look at the evidence, or the lack thereof, for CO2 affecting temperatures, maybe it’s time we start to take a more serious look at this alternative theoretical model on CO2 that maintains that CO2 does not markedly affect climate temperatures beyond ~ 200 ppm, or seriously consider that the feedbacks are not what the warmists say they are. This seems more in line with the actual evidence!

“… Reliable long-range climate modeling is not possible and may never be possible. It is in our nation’s best interest that this mode of prophecy be exposed for its inherent futility. …”
Exactly! This is a major point and thanks for making it in such a wonderful essay.
I’m going out on a limb here, but this essay may be the best here at WUWT in months. Damn good.

What can I say?

Abstract – 3 June 2013
Historical Antarctic mean sea ice area, sea ice trends, and winds in CMIP5 simulations
“…most climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) archive simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice area over the recent past,…”
doi:10.1002/jgrd.50443

What can I say?

House of commons oral evidence – 16 May 2013
Q 12 Peter Aldous: Do you feel that climate feedbacks are adequately understood and factored into climate models?
Professor Hansen: No. For example, one of the feedbacks is that as the planet gets warmer you melt ice. The Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the climate models indicated. The climate models often get criticised-and it is a valid criticism-that there is a lot of physics that we may not even have in the models, and that which we do have in may be inaccurate….
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmenvaud/uc60-i/uc6001.htm

So is Dr. Judith Lean’s statement, “There are no operational forecasts of global climate change” a result of learning from the erroneous forecasts that she made in her 2009 peer-reviewed paper, ‘How will Earth’s surface temperature change in future decades?’, where she said: “From 2009 to 2014, projected rises in anthropogenic influences and solar irradiance will increase global surface temperature 0.15 ± 0.03
C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC.” ?
Not only has global surface temperature not gone up within the error bounds of her forecast, all the global surface temp data sets have gone down over the period of her forecast. And both of the satellite data sets have gone down by nearly as much as the increase that she predicted. http://bit.ly/18l0h85
Back in 2009, after a decade of no warming, they were so sure that the warming ‘in the pipeline’ would re-emerge, they were confidently predicting a soon rapid rise in global surface temperature, especially since humans continued to produce CO2 at increasing rates. But alas, their models with exaggerated ghg effects & missing natural variability effects, failed them. How many more years of failed predictions will it take for them to admit that CO2 is a minor factor in climate?

Dr. Gray’s conclusion ought to be the last word on this multi-decadal fiasco. I am curious as to what Dr. Gray attributes the dearth of hurricanes this year – is it from low solar activity?
I disagree with the statement shown in the slide: “forecasting climate and weather are fundamentally different”. The climate we observe daily results exclusively from previous periods of daily weather. Get the daily weather forecasts right for the right reasons, and useful climate predictions will follow.
This of course means the same general drivers that influence daily weather dictate “climate” in the long run. That driver is NOT “climate change”. That is circular thinking. Would it be worth something to know what really drives extreme weather and climate change? There is someone who knows, someone who makes a living at long-range forecasting, someone who uses astrophysical knowledge with a proper understanding of the physics involved, a man who from my experience, makes very good 30 day forecasts regularly.
The scientist I speak of believes as Dr. Gray – that numerical weather and climate models are junk. They’re junk because they don’t work. They don’t work because they operate on wrong assumptions. The person I speak of is Piers Corbyn from weatheraction.com. If I could influence you to do anything today, it would be to go to his site and purchase a few months of USA forecasts for a few bucks. Find out how many snowmageddons he says we’ll get this month and why.
You might learn something, unless your name is Willis….

Mark and two Cats says:
December 10, 2013 at 3:55 pm

William M. Gray, Ph.D. … is professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Colorado State University

——————
Thanks to Dr Gray! I hope he doesn’t lose his job for daring to speak such heresy though.

A ‘professor emeritus’ is already retired. However, it is obvious that the dangers you mention are real, because it is generally only the retired who are willing to say these kinds of things that go against the orthodox party line.

That slide is the key point to the whole debate. Specifically: “after two weeks forecast error saturates …. to climatology”
Santer’s 17 years? P’shah. It’s 2 weeks. It’s absurd of course, but make them defend it — it is the science. The problem here is that, of course, the stochastic issues are not wholly accounted for after a 2 week period. Simply look at any of the quasicyclic issues such as the PDO. It is true that there is such nonsense after 2 weeks that there is no longer any worth in weather prediction; the error bands are just too broad.
This is first order goalpost games. eg. We don’t ‘forecast’ because it’s ‘deterministic.’ But it cannot be refuted because ‘weather’ is ‘too noisy’ after 2 weeks. Take that for consideration. The 11 year solar cycles are ‘weather’ and whatever the temperature does in response, it can neither validate nor refute the ‘deterministic climate equations.’ Indeed, nothing can. By definition, the errors are so strong that they can no longer tease the stochastic effects from the deterministic ones after 2 weeks time.
If ever you needed the definition of Cargo Cult Science — this is it. The argument made in the slide is that climate is indistinguishable from weather on climatological time scales. That it has always been thus. And yet the statements are that what we cannot find in the data, has been proven by our inability to find it, or find it’s refutation, or even find out what haystack the Stevenson screen is in.
Carry that slide with you everywhere and use it as the first cudgel in argument. The climastrologists need to strongly refute the statements contained within that one little image, or admit that climatology has thus far been pseudoscience pushed by the same sort of cranks that go in for over-unity magnet engines. Pure Jonestown Cult religious fanaticism.

Thank you, Dr Gray – telling it like it is. This needs to find it’s way into the hands of the general public. Even reporters ought to understand this.

Reliable long range forecast not reliable – I’ll say if you ever listen to a weather forecast no one can get correct five days in advance. And thank you DR to putting your self out there. Hopefully those who will attack you are those you fully expect to react – and you’re ready for the inevitable yet to come your way.

Wonderful command of language, and I suspect command of himself too. We need this strength of personality to speak truth unambiguously and loudly.

Wonderful……but will not get on the BBC or into the Guardian and the Independent newspapers.
Hell will freeze over before that happens.

“Reliable long-range climate modeling is not possible and may never be possible.”
Yep, that’s correct.
In engineering there are many things that cannot be reliably modeled and many things that can be reliably modeled.
For example; an Earth orbiting satellite has many parts that are bolted, riveted, welded and glued (yes, glued) together. No one attempts to create a numerical model to tell if the parts will stay together when it’s launched. Launch vibration loads are quite extreme and exceed anything typically seen in airplanes or cars (expect for crashes). The customers prefer that their satellite survive the launch (they are so darn picky). So instead of a numerical computer model a physical qualification model, or Qual Model, (QM) is built. This is done in a meticulous fashion where all the dimensions, assembly procedures, bolt torques, etc. are recorded. Even to the extent of tracking individual lot numbers of materials (you want to use metal that is all poured from the same melt (pot) of aluminum for example).
Then you take your QM and put it on a shaker table, a big metal slab with powerful hydraulic cylinders that can shake holy heck out of your model. You program the shaker to shake your model twice as hard as you expect it to be shaken when you launch it. If it survives, you then make a Flight Model, or FM using exactly the same documented processes. This method of using a model yields very high success rates in satellite launches.
In another aspect of modeling we need to make reliable predictions of how long a satellite will function once launched. Other than mission determined things like how high it will fly and how much fuel (used to steer the unit) are on board the largest determining factor is the rate at which the individual components degrade. Yes, the parts degrade and fail over time. Optical coatings “fog”, micrometeorites sever cabling, high energy particles damage/destroy semiconductor junctions, etc. Ironically the huge vibration forces experienced during launch have no effect once in space.
Here numerical calculations (a model in a sense) take the place of physical Qual Models.
Estimates of how often a micrometeorite may strike, how many high energy particles to expect (depends on the orbit of course) and how long an optical coating will last are gathered from prior mission histories and experiments. One long term Space Shuttle experiment “left” a whole bunch of material samples up in orbit for several years before retrieving it and bringing it back down to Earth for evaluation.
Knowing the expected degradation effects and the rate of occurrence of events beyond the control of the engineers it is possible to design a satellite with a design life from a few years to a decade or more (Hubble). With this knowledge it is possible to design enough redundancy into the system to have a high confidence that the system will last 5 years (for example) before failing. For example, if you know that a power cable (from the solar cells to a data processor) is likely to be hit and severed by a micrometeorite every 5 years you can calculate that having 4 power cables in parallel should supply power for ten years with an expected reliability of 99.99% (a numerical example to illustrate the concept, not to be taken as exact values please). Now you may launch a satellite and have two power cables cut in the first year and have the other 2 last until the unit is out of fuel. Or, you may launch a bird and have all the cables intact for years until the unit runs out of fuel. But your model predicts that the chances the unit will operate for 10 years are greater than 99.99%. Another model may say that a unit with only one power cable has only a 50% chance of operating for 10 years, perhaps that is acceptable for a 2 year mission.
Given the long history of successful satellite launches this modeling process works quite well. But space is a nasty place and satellites will still occasionally fail without much warning, this is why the ultra high reliability GPS system has entire “spare” satellites “up there” ready to be repositioned just in case that one in a million event occurs. Several examples of units that “lost their minds” and tumbled out of control exist, and unfortunately most satellites have antennas that must be pointed back to Earth so they can be commanded and controlled. Once they tumble you cannot “talk” to them to see what’s going on. This is generally believed to be caused by high energy particles that exceeded the capabilities of the unit. In fact, many satellites have areas of heavy shielding which can be turned towards the Sun to hopefully block particles from solar flares.
Models, physical and numerical are very indispensable tools in Science and Engineering, but they need to be carefully verified and applied judiciously. Reprogramming a whole society to turn away from the life enhancing possibilities of “fossil” fuels based on climate “models” is madness and demonstrates extreme hubris on the part of those folks “pushing” these models. And history will ultimately show they are in fact full of hooey. Climate models will ultimately turn out to be the biggest scientific folly of their era.
Cheers, Kevin.

Dr. Gray’s essay gets off to a bad start in the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph, where it claims that the general circulation models predict. That a model predicts implies the existence of the statistical population underlying this model. For the general circulation models there isn’t one. To state that the models “project” avoids this problem.
REPLY: You know, your semantic whining about predict -vs- project on just about every thread that uses either word is really becoming tiresome. Dr. Gray has his view, and people understand what he’s talking about. Give it a rest. – Anthony

I’m a confirmed skeptic, but radiative physics is a bit more complex than simply drawing conclusions from concentration ratios.
Thank you David, for saving me the trouble. This is the umptieth time this false analogy has showed up on WUWT and yes, it needs to get squashed every time. The relevant fact is that the atmosphere is measurably opaque in the LWIR bands associated with CO_2, water vapor, and ozone. It is seriously opaque when there are clouds.
rgb

Temperatures always follow the energy, and the energy in the ocean is thousands of times greater than the energy in the atmosphere. Not surprising that minor changes in ocean circulation can have a large influence on air temps.
Dr. Gray’s three points have always been true. For the modelers I’ll add a fourth. The atmosphere had been changing due to biology for over a billion years. Anaerobic bacteria have been around a lot longer. The result of a couple billion years of biological chemistry is that the composition of the atmosphere is entirely biological. If you don’t understand the global biogeochemical carbon cycle then you can’t possibly understand the atmosphere.
Biological properties can’t be understood by models written by physicists.

Perhaps the readers of WUWT would be interested in helping Dr Gray’s Hurricane forecasting group out? They recently lost some private backing and I believe are still looking for a new funding source. Note that without funding, they say they may have to shut the project down. This would be a great loss.

“The relevant fact is that the atmosphere is measurably opaque in the LWIR bands”
Yes, indeed it is, no doubt about that. And IF the surface was a narrow band emitter that ONLY gave off EM radiation in those bands the “Greenhouse Effect” would be a no-brainer, the energy would all be “trapped” and it would never leave and things would roast.
But, in reality the surface is a broadband emitter, and any individual photon has chances of being emitted at almost any wavelength outside of the “opaque” bands. And then it makes its way out to the mostly energy free void of space.
The much vaunted “Greenhouse Effect” merely delays the flow of energy through the Sun/Earth’s Surface/Atmosphere/Universe system by a few tens of milliseconds. Like an optical integrating sphere which demonstrates what a climate scientist would call “nearly” 100% radiative forcing. But the integrating sphere does not supply any “net energy gain” or “extra energy” and simply acts as an optical delay line.
When a pulse of light is input to an integrating sphere you can observe this delay as a “pulse stretching” effect. When a steady state input (like the EM radiation output from the Sun) is applied you cannot (with the currently available tools) observe this delay.
Very high scientific standards displayed here; “it needs to get squashed every time”.
Yes indeed, let’s “squash” anyone that disagrees with us.
For your information there is a whole field of engineering known as “optical engineering” which applies all of the theories of “radiative physics” to solve real problems. AND NONE of my textbooks (going back 5 decades) acknowledge anything as silly as the “Greenhouse Effect”. But we only design things that actually work, not models of hypothesized “effects”.
Please explain again how a gas present in minuscule amounts in the atmosphere with a thermal capacity nearly equal to nothing is “forcing” the massive thermal capacity of the oceans into “thermal equilibrium” and increasing their temperature by 20 some degrees, but this effect cannot be detected beyond the natural temperatures of the complex natural system ?
Squash away good man, squash away…..
Cheers, Kevin.

I heard that Gavin S. will assume the “Anointed” God of GISS. His God-ship will carry forth from the failed, multiple adjectives apply, James Hansen.
That makes his ‘twit’ all the more telling … ‘a career’ “as good as it gets” and ‘a life’ “useless.”
Chinese curse, “careful what you wish for … you may get it!”
Klingon toast, “make a wish.”
🙂

You know, your semantic whining about predict -vs- project on just about every thread that uses either word is really becoming tiresome. Dr. Gray has his view, and people understand what he’s talking about. Give it a rest. – Anthony
Hear, hear! Especially on a thread that explicitly begins with a slide stating “There are no operational forecasts of global climate change”, and where Dr. Gray is clearly stating that:
The still-strong—but false—belief that skillful long-range climate prediction is possible is thus a dangerous idea. The results of the climate models have helped foster the current political clamor for greatly reducing fossil fuel use even though electricity generation costs from wind and solar are typically three to five times higher than generation from fossil fuels. The excuse for this clamor for renewable energy is to a large extent the strongly expressed views of the five Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, which are based on the large (and unrealistic) catastrophic global warming projections from climate models.
There is absolutely nothing unambiguous or (as you repeatedly put it) fallacious about this statement. It is clear and succinct. In it Dr. Gray clearly uses both prediction and projection in ways that that demonstrate that he is fully aware of their meaning. So when he says “It is impossible for climate models to predict the globe’s future climate for at least three basic reasons.” we can easily understand exactly what he is saying, especially when he proceeds to clearly enumerate those reasons. His statement, the enumerated reasons, and his conclusion are apparent to any reader. It is a contribution to the debate, as one can disagree with his reasons and conceive of ways of applying evidence-based reasoning to verify or falsify them.
Your own statements, in the meantime, do not contain anything useful that pertains to the climate debate. Whether one calls GCM forecasts “predictions”, “projections”, or (as Dr. Gray also refers to them) prophecies is immaterial. What matters is that they have no predictive skill (or “projective” skill, or “prophetic” skill). What also matters, as he rather clearly points out, is that the public, politicians, and scientists alike are all too easily taken in by the sensationalist treatment of CAGW by the press, by a small but determined group of interested parties that reap fame, fortune, and political power from the issue, and by a small cadre of scientists that have transformed global climate into the overarching funding mechanism for environmental science to the enormous benefit of the discipline and those that work in it.
In our last interaction, you ended by accusing me of an ad hominem attack on you because I stated clearly that nobody cares about your attempt to somehow transform the distinction between prediction and projection into something significant, into something somehow relevant to the correctness or reliability of the science. In this you are mistaken. I’ll state it again — nobody cares about your assertion in this arena not because you are stupid or incompetent, not even because you are or are not incorrect in making them, but because they are irrelevant to the actual debate, which is absolutely about the kind of points that Dr. Gray is making above and that you appear to be incapable of making. Climate models are not doubtable because they are projections but people call them predictions — actually they are frequently called projections by climate modellers as an excuse for their failure to even approximately predict. They are doubtable because they (so far) do not work!
And because there are some excellent reasons to believe that they will not work anytime in the near future. I personally am less skeptical than Dr. Gray about their prospects thirty years from now, simply because 30 years ago I was doing my numerical work with a 64KB motherboard 5 MHz IBM PC instead of a 4 GB motherboard 2×3 GHz dual-core laptop over 1000 times faster (which isn’t even my latests/fastest system) and when in the meantime we’ve learned to aggregate piles of similarly fast processors into supercomputers capable of tens of trillions of operations per second. 30 years from now, we may well be able to solve the hydrodynamics problems at a useful granularity. 30 years from now we may have the observational data and theory worked out to where we can solve the right equations in the process, as well. Or maybe not.
In the meantime, however, they are not working, for all the reasons Dr. Gray indicates and more besides. It isn’t that CO_2 couldn’t produce warming of the scale claimed — the computations show that subject to certain assumptions the claim is at least conditionally plausible — it is that so far it simply hasn’t. The GCMs are not working well, at least so far. Whether or not there are reasons that they aren’t working — a string of La Ninas instead of the super El Nino the models seem to “expect”, as Nick Stokes recently suggested — isn’t particularly material. One expects models to fail when there are important reasons for their failure. Dr. Gray has listed three possible reasons in considerable detail. A recent WUWT-reported peer reviewed article strongly supports one of them — the failure of GCMs to correctly treat deep convection in storm clouds. There are still other good reasons to doubt that I sometimes list, such as some very fundamental questions about convergence and granularity that one cannot avoid when one is doing computations at the bleeding edge of available capacity and where e.g. doubling the resolution requires more than an order of magnitude more compute power and/or time to run.
The interesting thing is that at the end of the day, at the end of the AGU meeting, there will no doubt be a fair number of papers and talks presented that address the failure of the GCMs to predict “the pause”, as this is a fairly serious concern for all of the global warming enthusiasts. A lot of people have to be wondering about the solar cycle at this point — we are at or past solar maximum, and there is at least some reason to think that we are about to have a prolonged solar minimum that will rise to an even weaker solar maximum in the next cycle. If “the pause” continues or worse, becomes “the fall” — however slight — a lot of people are going to be scrutinizing the entire scientific industry that has built up around global warming to see if there was anything like the critical process associated with good science at work or if every paper and every voice was toeing some sort of party line.
A good scientist should never apologize for disagreeing, or even apologize for being wrong as long as the errors are honest errors. A good scientist looks hard for their own errors without waiting for others to point them out. Good science isn’t decided by a democratic process — it is an absolute tyranny. Humans get zero votes — nature gets the only vote that matters. So even if 97% of all scientists really do agree that CAGW is our CO_2-doubling destiny (something that is enormously dubious, since it isn’t certain that 97% of all scientists agree with the theory of evolution or that quantum mechanics is a fully consistent theory) — 97% of all scientists can end up being wrong if nature votes the other way.
So please, Terry, cease the pointless debate about prediction vs projection.
Nobody cares.
rgb

This should be required reading for everyone attending climate lectures at AGU13.

davidmhoffer says: “…Now, stack thousands of those jars on top of each other in a tower 14 kilometers high. You’ll need a stack of 140 million jars. Now try drawing a line from bottom to top without hitting a red grain. You can’t. In fact, not only that, you can’t even do it without hitting thousands of red grains. I’m a confirmed skeptic, but radiative physics is a bit more complex than simply drawing conclusions from concentration ratios.”
Now do the same thing for the thermosphere. See if you can get a photon through it without hitting anything.

Forecasting is just guessing with computers.
The slide at the top says it all: error effects saturate weather forecasting models when run out to the 10-14 day mark. The same thing happens with climate models that get the clouds and the water vapor wrong.

Bob Weber says:
December 10, 2013 at 4:42 pm
“Dr. Gray’s conclusion ought…”
…
…
Then at the end, a cheap shoot is thrown for some odd reason,
“You might learn something, unless your name is Willis….”
————————-
Since when has it been a good thing to kick a man while he is down with a serious heart condition?

Dr. Gray, thanks for a great article! I particularly like the fact that you talk about the role that the hydrologic cycle plays in cooling the Earth’s surface; I have *never* seen this addressed properly in a “mainstream” source.
Tom J, the extra heat transport due to the hydrologic cycle is simple: when water evaporates at the surface, it removes heat from the surface, cooling it; when the water vapor then condenses at high altitude, to form clouds or precipitation, it gives up the heat, which gets radiated away to space. In other words, the hydrologic cycle is a separate heat transport mechanism that cools the surface. If the surface warms from some other cause, such as an increase in greenhouse gases, that increases the rate of the hydrologic cycle, which counteracts some of the warming that would otherwise occur; so the impact of a given increase in, say, CO2 is *smaller* when the hydrologic cycle is taken into account.

Thanks for this post. I have just one comment:
Yay !!!

rgb:
Your argument that we should cease “pointless debate” about prediction vs projection fosters unfounded conclusions regarding global warming, including its cause. By logical rule, one cannot logically draw a conclusion from an argument that is an equivocation. To draw such a conclusion is an “equivocation fallacy.”
An “equivocation” is an argument in which a term changes meaning in the midst of this argument. A “fallacious argument” is one in which the conclusion from this argument does not follow from the premises of this argument and from the principles of reasoning. In making an argument, one can head off application of the equivocation fallacy through the use of terms that are “monosemic.” A monosemic term is one that has a single meaning. A “polysemic” term has more than one meaning. For a debater who wishes to avoid application of the equivocation fallacy, the use of monosemic terms has no downside. In the record of our debate, however, I observe that you resolutely resist the use of monosemic terms. Is your purpose to make use of the equivocation fallacy in putting across illicit arguments? If not, what do you hope to accomplish in insisting upon the use of polysemic terms?
In the literature of global warming climatology, a number of terms are polysemic. When these terms are used in making an argument there is the danger of reaching a logically unfounded conclusion. Among these terms are “predict” and “forecast.” These two terms reference a model that: a) has an underlying statistical population and b) has no underlying statistical population.
In the latter type of model, the statistical idea of a “frequency” does not exist. It follows that the idea of a “relative frequency” does not exist. As a relative frequency is the empirical counterpart of a probability, a “probability” has no empirical counterpart thus disappearing as a scientific concept. The ideas of “information” and “logic” disappear as well.
In the former type of model, the statistical idea of a “frequency” exists. It follows that the idea of a “relative frequency” exists. As a relative frequency is the empirical counterpart of a probability, a “probability” exists as a scientific concept. The ideas of “information” and “logic” exist as well.
The IPCC climate models have no underlying statistical population. All of the pathological features of a global warming study identified in the second paragraph above result from this absence. This state of affairs makes it clear that in debating the methodology of a global warming study we should adopt a linguistic convention that distinguishes between the type of model that has an underlying statistical population and the type of model that does not. Don’t you agree?

Let’s say there was no global warming scare, no IPCC, no fear mongering etc. People would adapt and mitigate as they have always done since the end of the last glaciation. No need for global action. What an utter waste of time, can’t these people find something else better to do?
MAN-MADE
✔Thames flood barrier
✔Dutch Polders
✔Flood defences
✔Clothing, hats, gloves, UV sunglasses
✔Air conditioning, fans, central heating
✔Double glazing, triple glazing (Scandinavia)
✔Homes on stilts around the world, igloos, tree houses
✔Bad weather warnings
✔New farming methods, livestock breeding for desired traits
✔Water wells, boreholes and desal plants
✔Use of fire
✔Concrete
✔Sand replenishment on beaches
✔White painted homes and walls in the tropics
✔Tornado hatches
etc., etc., etc.
NATURAL
✔Bangladesh gaining landmass over the last few decades
✔Coral island atolls rise with sea level rise
✔Marshlands change with sea level rise
✔Plants move uphill / plants move downhill
✔ Animals move north / south
✔Birds bigger / birds smaller 😉
✔Greening of the biosphere in recent decades
✔Gaia hypothesis at work?
✔Natural climate oscillations
✔More clouds / less clouds
✔More NH winter snow, bigger albedo
✔Less NH spring snow, lower albedo
✔Antarctica sea ice extent up (allegedly caused by global warming)
✔Antarctica recent cold record shattered! (This may be soon blamed on AGW)
✔2009-2011 extreme snowfalls in East Antarctica (maybe due to AGW)
etc., etc., etc.
Yet we feel the need to call special global conferences to deal with things we have been dealing with at a local and regional level since we discovered fire.

Whenever my hero speaks, I listen. And while not one of the 4 Gospels, Dr William Grays
http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
is as close as you can get without being in scripture… at least to me.

Climate is not weather.. true, yet the patterns of weather over prolonged periods of time become climate. In the end, you are asked to believe that the design of the system along with the sun, the oceans and stochastic events, will be changed in an way that it will change where it would go naturally, but a trace gas that is needed for life on the planet and has been far higher with COLDER CONDITIONS, and lower with warm.
It is fantasy, and nature, not man, controls the climate of the planet
So like a weather forecast.. one must weigh the parameters given and then make the forecast. Given the flip of the pdo and soon the amo, the planet will ( has started ) cool. Gray opined we would warm in the 1970s, was spot on about the leveling and begin of the turn around. Far better than the screams of tipping points by people who have never made a forecast in their life that they have been held accountable for. And that is the big difference also. In what I do in the private sector, against many super talented private and gvt mets, if I do not bring value to the table, I get fired. Well I am 58 and I am still standing. But if you never learn that, because you simply make statements that this will happen and that will happen in some far off time, or when the opposite happens say its all part of what you thought, you can again see what the real difference between weather and climate is… THE BOTTOM LINE. In forecasting, you have to be judged by the result of your idea. Apparently the AGW crowd thinks that isnt an issue, that eventually they will be right.

TB says:
December 11, 2013 at 3:27 am
“Climate is NOT weather projected into the future. Climate creates weather – hang on – in the sense that the Earth acts as a heat engine. It receives energy from the Sun and it is reflected/absorbed/re-radiated back to space. Only two factors essentially govern it’s working – energy in vs energy out, this is constrained by albedo and radiative forcing (and for past epochs by orbital eccentricity). Weather is the chaos in the system – the noise on the general climate trend (up or down). To suppose that climate is weather projected forward is missing seeing the wood by only seeing the trees.”
This wrong in so many ways, I don’t know what to point out first!
1. The Earth is not in equilibrium, it does not have ‘A Climate’ in the sense you use it:
“Moreover, it hardly needs stating that the Earth does not have just one temperature. It is not in global thermodynamic equilibrium – neither within itself nor with its surroundings.
It is not even approximately so for the climatological questions asked of the temperature
field. Even when viewed from space at such a distance that the Earth appears as a point
source, the radiation from it deviates from a black body distribution and so has no one
temperature [6]. There is also no unique “temperature at the top of the atmosphere”. The
temperature field of the Earth as a whole is not thermodynamically representable by a single
temperature.”
[6] Essex C., Kennedy D., Berry R. S., How hot is radiation?, Am. J. Phys., 71 (2003),
969–978.
2. To talk about the Earth’s ‘climate’ as if it was independent of its Geography, let alone its Geology is absurd. I’ll list some of the ‘essential factors’ below:
a. Oblate spheroid, rotating on axis creating uneven “energy in”! We know these as the seasons! Precession is in flux.
b. Diameter and hence, speed of rotation at equator faster, creating Coriolis effect, which dominates the global circulation patterns (The trade winds). Creating the major climatic zones (Desert/Jungle)
c. The shape and geographical distribution of land masses and bodies of water (All of which are in flux).
e. The Earth’s magnetic field, without which, there would be no atmosphere (It would have blown away in the solar wind)
f. The Moon and it’s effect on rotation and tides
g. The earth’s elemental composition. Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe yet most of the Earths is locked in the core. “Energy in” and carbon-dioxide are utilised by all life on earth and much is stored as biological mass via photosynthesis.
I probably didn’t point out the most important but you get the idea.

***
davidmhoffer says:
December 10, 2013 at 9:46 pm
You’ve no idea how much work keeping one going actually is until you try and do it. How Anth_ny keeps up is quite beyond me.
***
I agree. Parsing WUWT & some other blogs requires (for me) heavy mental processing, and my meager brain runs out by early afternoon. Need a sleep period to regain mental integrity for such blogs.

in baseball a hitters average = his climate………his individuals at bats = weather…………..WHICH is in control of the other…..does his average determine the outcome of his next at bat OR does the outcome of that at bat impact his average……the point is simple the climate has NO CONTROL over the weather.

Peter Donis: I could have written something about immunization strategies, but thought this would suffice.

Thank You, Dr Grey!
I’m forwarding your essay to my WA state representatives on the “Climate Legislative and Executive Workgroup”. Anyone interested in the climate machinations that Gov. Inslee is attempting to implement in the state of Washington can find more info here:
http://www.governor.wa.gov/issues/economy/climateWorkgroup/default.aspx
There is a public hearing this Friday from 2 – 5pm at the state capitol in Olympia, to “….hear the publics views on the workgroups draft report and potential policies and actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Washington state”. Agenda here:
http://www.governor.wa.gov/issues/economy/climateWorkgroup/documents/Agenda_20131213.pdf
As expected, the ‘public hearing’ has been gerrymandered to effectively minimize the public input. Two panels of ‘experts’ (lobbyists) will consume a significant part of the time allotted and the remaining time will be distributed to individuals through a lottery system. This effectively minimizes the potential for true individuals to speak and gives organized teams of ‘individuals’ higher odds that one of their people will be selected to deliver the team message.
A supplemental economic analysis document was added to the last meetings summary. It is enlightening to read the adverse effects that various carbon tax and ‘clean/alternate’ energy proposals will have on economic conditions in Washington state.
http://www.governor.wa.gov/issues/economy/climateWorkgroup/documents/SupplementalEconomicAnalysis_20131209.pdf
MtK

IgI: I have used standard physics.
The IPCC ‘consensus’ is based on 13 mistakes in physics, 3 of them s elementary as t be embarrassing.
How we got here is interesting. Thus Physics itself is also to blame by its persistent belief that the atmosphere is a grey body absorber/emitter. It is not, being semi-transparent to IR.
This is probably the single biggest mistake. Engineers like me don’t make such mistakes because we have to get it right.

Janice Moore
December 11, 2013 at 1:05 pm
‘@ Tom J — I am easily misunderstood (likely mostly my fault) here on WUWT. I sure hope I didn’t offend you above.’
Dear Janice,
I certainly hope you get my rather late reply to your statement above. No, no, no, I am most decidedly not offended in the least by anything you’ve said, kiddo. I may be a motorhead but my occupation, before I went on disability, was as a commercial artist. So, my hands are set up a little more for delicate, precision work, although I’ve dropped a few transmissions, changed clutches, pulled a cylinder head, tuned ’em, and changed a fair amount of oil in my time. Unfortunately my oil changing days on my 1989 Alfa Romeo Milano are over. I still tinker with it though.
No need to apologize since there’s nothing to apologize for. Know of a nice 426 Hemi for sale?

to Terry Oldberg : please stop trying to defend the indefensible, Climate models are no go good for any play on words you may try to use. They amount to this ‘garbage in garbage out’.

lgl says:
The 3.7 is at TOA. At the surface it will be much more, ~9 W/m2.

I make it about 6.6 w/m2 at the surface. Using a very rough, very simple model we have in “pre-industrial” times
OLR (to space) = Incoming Solar radiation =~ 240 w/m2
Surface energy flux = ~388 w/m2.
Double atmospheric CO2 so that OLR = 236 w/m2 (reduction of 4 w/m2)
Fraction of OLR/Surface = 236/388 = 0.608
Because OLR is less than Incoming Solar then the surface must warm and continue to warm until balance is restored.
New Surface Temp = 240/0.608 = 394.57 w/m2 i.e. an increase of ~6.6 w/m2. This represents a temperature increase of ~1.2 degrees (14.6K -> 15.8K).

Clive 4:10pm: “… the empirical data doesn’t actually prove (a disparity of ~0.6 +/-0.2W/m^2.)”
Not all circular. The Stephens et. al. 2012 imbalance discussion points to the thermometer measured upper ocean energy content changes as the source for this figure with 95% confidence interval (not the GCMs). The cite points to Lyman et. al. Nature 2010 measured for the period 1993-2008. It is reported CERES data with higher uncertainty tends to trend reasonably in same amount.
2003 to 2008 Argo data suggests 0.77 +/- 0.11 W/m^2 global ocean or 0.54 W/m^2 entire Earth. So the various data are good for now but climate variables can change per a certain MIT director 1:56pm.
I expect career level funding will continue in order to monitor the changes.

TB says:
December 12, 2013 at 4:59 am
——————————————–
TB,
your response has fallen into they typical format of radiative greenhouse defenders –
“The surface will not be uniform. Some parts will be hotter than others, and this will set up local turbulence/convection. Growing and taking heat from the tropics to colder parts. The N2 will be in motion.
There will be some energy exchange from this convection but on balance, heat flux to the N2 goes nowhere. For N2 cannot emit it to space. It can only conduct it back to the surface (somewhere).”
– the hand waving that somehow strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation can continue in the absence of radiative gases. It cannot. Radiative cooling at altitude is critical to this circulation.
Conductive heating and cooling of the atmosphere at surface level will never create enough “turbulence” to drive strong vertical circulation over the 10 to 15 km height of the troposphere.
Radiative cooling at altitude is critical to driving strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation. The amount of energy being radiated to space from the upper atmosphere is more than TWICE the energy being absorbed by the atmosphere from incoming solar IR and outgoing surface IR. This is because radiative gases at altitude are not just emitting energy from absorbed IR to space, but also all the energy the atmosphere acquired from surface conduction and the release of latent heat from condensing water vapour.
Due to issues of IR opacity, the ability of radiative gases to heat the atmosphere is an inverse logarithmic function of their concentration. Their ability to cool the atmosphere however is a far more linear function of their concentration.
And the ability of radiative gases to slow the cooling of the “surface”? Far less than claimed. Incident LWIR can neither heat nor slow the cooling rate of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool. That would be 71% of the earth’s surface. Go back and check the calculations of the pseudo scientists, they calculated the effect of LWIR on the oceans based on their emissivity. This works for most materials, but not liquid water.
Radiative gases do absorb IR and heat the atmosphere. Radiative gases do emit IR back to the surface slowing the cooling of the land surface only. However radiative gases primary role in our atmosphere is cooling, via LWIR emission to space. Adding radiative gases to the atmosphere will not reduce the atmospheres radiative cooling ability.

Konrad 5:23pm: “- you left out the “distribution”. Why was that?”
Thanks for asking. For one, you didn’t define “distribution”. The reason I see is defn. “distribution” is part of the Callendar 1938 science conclusions and as discussed in the exchange between Sir George Simpson and the author. “Distribution of heat supply” allows the global system to be nearly balanced and in part for real global convective, conductive, radiative energy transfer (transport) to be superposed for global surface Tmean calculations.
The “distribution” you mention has no effect on the mostly non-overlap shown in Fig. 7-11 in TB’s Chapt. 7 link from which your 2:57am assertions are empirically shown incorrect. Nor does “distribution” influence global f term in eqn. 7.16. Your unmet challenge remains to show where Chapt. 7 science (theory and empirical) actually becomes false. Assertions won’t work.
Strong vertical convective circulation does not dump energy to space, dumps it to the atm., i.e. “distributes” energy within the control volume of interest. Only radiative transfer dumps control volume energy out to deep space.
BTW, there is a great paper of the emissivity of ocean water over the Pacific; I will let you find it as a challenge. Ask if you can’t since it empirically shows your assertion clipped here to be incorrect on Earth scales: “Incident LWIR can neither heat nor slow the cooling rate of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool.”
IOW, the paper confirms the emissivity/absorption of great expanses of ocean water to be reasonably correctly used in TB’s linked Chapt. 7 and Callendar 1938.

Ron C. 6:11am:”no significant greenhouse effect. .. the CO2 effect is already saturated.”
Depends on the meaning of “significant” in number terms. The Tmean anomaly being discussed is on the order of 0.2C per century or recent ocean energy measured imbalance of 0.6W/m^2 out of some 240. I would point to Callendar 1938 Fig. 2 for the log curve; at 400ppm anomaly in C is still not leveled off with increasing CO2 PPM.
Modern curves are similar if you want to cite one.
“..facts that dismiss alarmist claims.”
Callendar 1938 discusses the benefits of increasing CO2 ppm. It is obvious on the ‘net that a view can be formed either way.

Ron C. 9:01am “..not alarming.”
Dunno. I don’t have a view. If pressed, I’ll go with the top post title. There is a certain futility in long range climate prediction given all the chaotic variables. One should not have a view on the science though; it is easy enough to find & read a good atm. thermo. text book if proficient on the pre-req.s.

Konrad says:
December 13, 2013 at 5:22 pm
TB says:
December 12, 2013 at 4:59 am
——————————————–
TB,
your response has fallen into they typical format of radiative greenhouse defenders –
“The surface will not be uniform. Some parts will be hotter than others, and this will set up local turbulence/convection. Growing and taking heat from the tropics to colder parts. The N2 will be in motion.
There will be some energy exchange from this convection but on balance, heat flux to the N2 goes nowhere. For N2 cannot emit it to space. It can only conduct it back to the surface (somewhere).”
– the hand waving that somehow strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation can continue in the absence of radiative gases. It cannot. Radiative cooling at altitude is critical to this circulation.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No, not hand-waving – just basic Meteorology.
Radiative effects can be removed from the physics and convection start/continue. One need only consider in inhomegenities present in a rotating non-radiative atmosphere – differential heating and friction primarily. It must all obviously follow from there. Any fluid (as an atmosphere behaves) will begin/continue motion by those mechanisms. Have you not seen experiments of rotating pans of water heated at the outside and cooled in the middle? They develop turbulence then eddies/flows (Rossby waves/vortices/jets) to try to get to thermodynamic equilibrium. No radiation is involved.
In the case of planetary atmosphere this would set in train a “heat-pump” mechanism whereby compression/rarefaction would transfer heat down (as described in my post) thereupon at some point “normal” convection would occur where the loss of internal energy via the DALR would cause a natural vertical motion once the atmosphere has equaled/exceeded this value. “Normal” convection then keeps the LR pretty much stable due to transport of WV therefore LH release aloft.
“Conductive heating and cooling of the atmosphere at surface level will never create enough “turbulence” to drive strong vertical circulation over the 10 to 15 km height of the troposphere.”
I didn’t say at the surface – I said it starts there (as it must as there is the density discontinuity).
The turbulence caused by differential conduction due to latitudinal thermal absorption variation then friction slowing as convection/turbulence advances will build through and mix to the full depth of the atmosphere with thermal winds created aloft eventually forming jet streams/Rossby waves etc (as in differentially heated “hemispheres” of water in a rotating pan) and hence baroclinic vortices. All this can take place without radiating gases.
“Radiative cooling at altitude is critical to driving strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation. The amount of energy being radiated to space from the upper atmosphere is more than TWICE the energy being absorbed by the atmosphere from incoming solar IR and outgoing surface IR. This is because radiative gases at altitude are not just emitting energy from absorbed IR to space, but also all the energy the atmosphere acquired from surface conduction and the release of latent heat from condensing water vapour.”
I believe I agreed with this in my response to your OP. However convection can/does take place without radiational involvement – other than radiative cooling of cloud tops overnight (hence the max severe thunderstorm incidence occurring late in the night). That’s caused by a radiative cooling of the parcel top and thereby causing a greater instability within the rising air of the parcel (cloud).
In the Hadley cell, yes, air cools as it heads away from the ITCZ (chiefly via WV emission) but it also converges at around 30N due Coriolis and would descend anyway, setting up the circulation.
“Due to issues of IR opacity, the ability of radiative gases to heat the atmosphere is an inverse logarithmic function of their concentration. Their ability to cool the atmosphere however is a far more linear function of their concentration.”
?Whatever .. So you are saying that increasing GHG’s has a net effect of cooling the atmosphere?
It has the net effect of cooling the Strat (which is what observation shows). But has a net effect of warming the Trop – right up to the ‘pause.
“And the ability of radiative gases to slow the cooling of the “surface”? Far less than claimed. Incident LWIR can neither heat nor slow the cooling rate of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool. That would be 71% of the earth’s surface. Go back and check the calculations of the pseudo scientists, they calculated the effect of LWIR on the oceans based on their emissivity. This works for most materials, but not liquid water.”
Err, and you accuse me of hand-waving. Supporting evidence please.
“LWIR can neither heat nor slow the cooling rate of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool”.
Yes it most assuredly can see my above post to Konrad.
No, I wont check anything – it is you making assertions away from established physics – therefore it is you that should provide links to studies that support your view.
“Radiative gases do absorb IR and heat the atmosphere. Radiative gases do emit IR back to the surface slowing the cooling of the land surface only. However radiative gases primary role in our atmosphere is cooling, via LWIR emission to space. Adding radiative gases to the atmosphere will not reduce the atmospheres radiative cooling ability.”
No – and I answered this assertion in my OP. GHG’s do not reduce the atmospheres cooling ability – but they do slow it such that it has to radiate at a higher temp in order to overcome the “constriction” of terrestrial IR photons to space. Shifting the LR balance point higher and raising the surface temp 33C above what it would be without.
So you are saying that Venus is colder than it would have been by having a CO2 atmosphere rather than a N2+O2 one? – crickey! and it’s at 460C now.
Your assertions are all contrary to established physics and observation.
I think I asked this of you up-thread – again – what is causing the heating of Venus if not it’s CO2 atmosphere? And don’t say internal heat as it’s not as it’s not a gaseous planet and any internal heat would be caused by radioactive decay, which is many orders of magnitude less than solar input.
Here is the IPCC’s view (using fundamental physics).
There is a general warming effect through the Troposphere due increasing GHG concentrations…
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-9-2.html
Applying my favoured physical conceptual method to the question, I reason it this way:
You assert that GHG’s cool the Earth…..
Now we have a process whereby molecules present in a medium are able to catch energy (thereby distribute it to molecules around via conduction) and then re-admit it. Like for like in all directions.
This happens throughout the atmosphere. Now given that the energy can only escape finally to space the majority of photons will be emitted from the surface at least once and some more than once. Therefore the IR energy will be focused within the whole depth of the atmosphere in preference to it’s emittance to space.
A bouncing ball in a courtyard with one open end – will necessarily spend more time in the yard as a result of “bouncing” off 3 sides and only having an exit on one.