No matter if it's a climatic 'pause' or 'jolt', still no warming

The lecture by Hayek seems to be a contradiction in abstract steps, if you will.
First, the point:
In some fields, particularly where problems of a similar kind arise in the physical sciences, the difficulties can be overcome by using, instead of specific information about the individual elements, data about the relative frequency, or the probability, of the occurrence of the various distinctive properties of the elements. But this is true only where we have to deal with what has been called, “phenomena of unorganized complexity,” in contrast to those “phenomena of organized complexity”
Would Hayek argue that climate models try to ‘explain’ a non linear, complex chaotic system, that is, a system that is unorganized complexity ? Then, it appears that he would support the climate model approach as valid ? Yet, later, the author pleads :
What I mainly wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.
And, offers a glimpse of intended summary :
The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science.
While arguing for the one take away:
A theory of essentially complex phenomena must refer to a large number of particular facts; and to derive a prediction from it, or to test it, we have to ascertain all these particular facts. Once we succeeded in this there should be no particular difficulty about deriving testable predictions – with the help of modern computers it should be easy enough to insert these data into the appropriate blanks of the theoretical formulae and to derive a prediction. The real difficulty, to the solution of which science has little to contribute, and which is sometimes indeed insoluble, consists in the ascertainment of the particular facts.
Concluding with a more general summary:
There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in mens fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization …
I feel that his initial apparent support for unorganized complexity to be ‘understood’ by ‘frequencies’ and/or ‘probabilities’ undercuts the value of his summary with respect to making this piece a critical argument in the ‘climate models are failing’ argument one might be tempted to bring forth. What am I missing here ?

The censorship of the government.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/energy/democrats-plan-to-pressure-tv-networks-into-covering-climate-change-20140114
You know they can’t report it honestly.

JR says:
January 14, 2014 at 4:42 pm
Global temps have not increased … but Arctic and sub Arctic temps have … what is going on? Even now the average temp above 80 degs north remains above the average (albeit a small data set).
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yet all summer, the time when the temperature is above freezing, the Arctic temperature was BELOW average. http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php (click on year 2013)
I suggest you read the WUWT discussion on a paper published in the fall of 2012: Can we predict the duration of an interglacial?

…We propose that the interval between the “terminal” oscillation of the bipolar seesaw, preceding an interglacial, and its first major reactivation represents a period of minimum extension of ice sheets away from coastlines…
…thus, the first major reactivation of the bipolar seesaw would probably constitute an indication that the transition to a glacial state had already taken place….
…Comparison [of the Holocene] with MIS 19c, a close astronomical analogue characterized by an equally weak summer insolation minimum (474Wm−2) and a smaller overall decrease from maximum summer solstice insolation values, suggests that glacial inception is possible despite the subdued insolation forcing, if CO2 concentrations were 240±5 ppmv (Tzedakis et al., 2012)

Actual Paper (PDF highlighted)
Paper on the bipolar seesaw: Twentieth century bipolar seesaw of the Arctic and Antarctic surface air temperatures Petr Chylek, Chris K. Folland, Glen Lesins, Manvendra K. Dubey
I will also reprint RACookPE1978 comment that explains why the bipolar seesaw could be the beginning of a new ice age:

Actually, right now, just look at real figures from today’s date for NSIDC’s sea ice plots: you “might” just find that 1.500 million km^2 “positive” above normal IS present around the Antarctic, while the Arctic is about 0.550 million km^2 below normal for this date. The sea ice deficit so often claimed by the CAGW theory (required by the CAGW theories!) is a POSITIVE at this date.
For the past two years, Antarctic sea ice has been consistently two std deviations ABOVE normal levels for sea ice, AND that sea ice extends around the continent to latitude 60 south at maximum extents in September. Arctic sea ice (through this year) been right at 1.5 to 2 std deviations low from normal. BUT! The Antarctic sea ice extents maximum is just under 20 Mkm^2, but the entire Arctic ocean is only 14 Mkm^2: There is much more Antarctic sea ice than Arctic. At minimum extents, the difference is more impressive: Antarctic continental ice (14 Mkm^2) is as large as the entire Arctic itself, but that rock-based icecap is in turn surrounded by 3.5 Mkm^2 of permanent ice shelves, and then by the ever-changing Antarctic sea ice. So even at today’s minimum Antarctic sea ice extents 2-3 Mkm^2 (and increasing!) the total southern ice is 14 + 3.5 + 2.5 = 20 Mkm^2. At maximum southern extents, those become 14.0 + 3.5 + 19.5 = 35 Mkm^2 is frozen. 2-1/2 times the maximum of what sea water is available up north.
On the other hand, Arctic sea ice lately (last 12 years) is only 3.5 – 4.0 million sq km AT ITS MINIMUM in September. We can lose AT MOST only another 3.5 million sq km2. That is it.
How much larger can Antarctic sea ice get? There is no limit. At today’s rate of Antarctic sea ice increase, Cape Horn itself could be closed to ship traffic due to sea ice within 8-10 years for months at a time every September and October. It probably won’t happen, but the trend is there: we have been seeing just under 1.0 Mkm^2 more sea ice each year for several years now.
To the specific point of open Arctic waters being a heat loss area from the earth. Notice that we are assuming far-north openings here, not a theoretical physics textbook ice mass of theoretical albedo = .95 floating off the ice-filled (Equatorial) waters of Polynesia where the sun is directly overhead (Air Mass = 1.0) with perfectly clear skies and no humidity. 8<)
But this little bit of remaining 3.5 Mkm^2 Arctic sea ice is actually in the water up between latitude 78 north to 83 north. At that latitude, in mid and late September when arctic sea ice is at its minimum extents, there is MORE heat lost from open waters due to more evaporation losses, more conduction losses, more convective losses, and more radiation losses from open sea water than can be gained from that exposed water getting heated by the ever-lower sun angles! At those latitudes, at that time of year, the HIGHEST the sun can get is 8 – 12 degrees above the horizon, air masses are 18 to 34. There simply is no solar heat penetrating the atmosphere at those low solar angles to be gained if the Arctic ice continues to melt.
The more the Arctic sea ice melts from today’s minimum extents in August and September, the more the planet loses heat energy to space and cools down ever more. Your CAGW’s religiously amplified but majestically feared “arctic amplification” due to sea ice meltdown is totally, completely backwards.
But it is worse than you think!
At today’s levels of BOTH minimum AND maximum extent in the Antarctic seas, today’s (and last year’s!) record breaking sea ice extents DO reflect much more solar energy than the exposed waters! At the edge of the Antarctic sea ice at 60 – 70 south latitude, ALL YEAR, every day, the record-breaking Antarctic sea ice extents IS reflecting MORE solar energy and IS cooling the planet down even more.
And thus we slide quickly into the next major ice age.

We may or may not be looking at a major ice age, the jury is still out on that, but with the summer insolation declining in the NH, ([s]olar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ~11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes) and near the level for triggering glacial inception, we certainly are not looking at a “Tipping Point” towards warming. At least not for thousands of years.

“….the June 21 insolation minimum at 65N during MIS 11 is only 489 W/m2, much less pronounced than the present minimum of 474 W/m2. In addition, current insolation values are not predicted to return to the high values of late MIS 11 for another 65 kyr. We propose that this effectively precludes a ‘double precession-cycle’ interglacial [e.g., Raymo, 1997] in the Holocene without human influence….” http://web.pdx.edu/~chulbe/COURSES/QCLIM/reprints/LisieckiRaymo_preprint.pdf
(NOTE: pdf has been removed from internet)

This is the elephant that stomps all over CAGW alarmism.

Once at the Guardian one commenter lamented why people were claiming a surface temperature standstill. I showed him my list. This way they find it hard to call me the D word as I am simply quoting mostly Warmist climate scientists on their side. It also scrambles their brains.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/14/no-matter-if-its-a-climatic-pause-or-jolt-still-no-warming/#comment-1536057

Now that the majority of ground based weather stations have migrated from Rural to Urban and airports we will see just how big a jolt we get after the pause, especially with satellites monitoring the ground stations.

These snake oil sellers couldn’t predict the cessation of GW, but now they expect us to believe they know that it is just temporary – mind boggling delusionairies.

I’d like to see how many “5 degrees by 2070″ models have 10-year pauses, but no one has put such a question to the modellers.
Sure they have. You can see the answer explicitly in AR5, in several distinct flavors. Steve McKintyre does a good job of deconstructing them here:
http://climateaudit.org/2013/10/08/fixing-the-facts-2/
Note well the changes made from the comparatively honest presentation in the AR5 draft and what they finally released. Don’t get me wrong — the AR5 initial draft was already misleading enough, as the grey envelopes are meaningless. But so is the spaghetti graph they replaced it with.
A proper treatment would have compared each independent GCM to reality, one at a time, and used the real-world result to reject pretty much all of the hottest GCMs (say, the upper third, the ones that are responsible for the upper part of the shaded grey in the draft report as failed models that should not be taken seriously any more. It would have flagged the middle third clustered around the presented centroid as being suspect models — egregiously/collectively deviating from reality, and given the requirements of avoiding data dredging, collectively weaker than one might even expect by individual comparisons. It would have presented the results from the coolest running models as being not egregiously in contradiction of reality, and weighted those models as being the GCMs most likely — in a statistically defensible sense — of being correct or having some predictive skill.
It might have then extrapolated the predictions of those coolest models to determine the likely warming to the end of the century while downgrading all of their confidences substantially, as basically every single statement made with “high confidence” in AR4 is proven false by time at this point, indicating that they need to back the hell off in their assertions of statistically unjustifiable confidence. Right now they are basically using “confidence” to mean “in the obviously highly biased opinions of the people who are writing the final AR SPMs”, not “based on a reliable statistical estimate derived from independent and identically distributed samples drawn from a common distribution after accounting for other sources of error”.
The former is confidence in the sense of confidence game, a.k.a. a con, a racket, the false presentation of a high degree of confidence that is in fact indefensible or that hides actual falsehood in order to advance some vested interest. The latter is what is usually used in science.
It is also extremely interesting that AR5 has “posthumously” backed way the hell off of their predictions for the mid-century mark even their final draft — but not in the SPM — in an addendum, to a rate that is actually dropping the end-of century warming to less than 2 C — contingent on all sorts of things people cannot predict, such as what Mr. Sun is doing in the latter half of this century, whether or not a few large volcanoes decide to start a decadal sustained eruption, what happens with human energy production, and just how important natural variability is, anyway.
I’ll just make my own prediction. In the real world, it is entirely possible that the warming will resume. Or not. Or it could cool. If at least some of the GCMs are even vaguely correct — something subject to extremely considerable doubt at this point, since some of the GCMs are almost certainly egregiously incorrect based on the comparison of their predictions with nature and since most of the GCMs are in substantial systematic disagreement with nature even where the disagreement is not so severe as to overtly falsify them, yet — at some point the warming will indeed resume. But ever year that it does not more severely constrains the Bayesian most probable values of things such as the climate sensitivity and the probable correctness of various implicit assumptions about climate dynamics in the models, even starting from initial priors with a probably absurd degree of initial confidence. In other words, the longer warming does not resume, the more likely it is that the long term warming will be substantially less than initially predicted, or if you prefer, the range of most probable future temperatures should monotonically decrease with every year of no meaningful warming.
In three more years, if no meaningful warming occurs — and given that we are going to be entering the downside of solar cycle 24 at that point, even the most die-hard warmist has to be worried that it will not, in fact, be warming by then and might even be cooling compared to a 1997-1998 Super-ENSO epoch — the Bayesian estimates will drop to where a catastrophe becomes actively improbable as opposed to actively probable. We’re well on the way there already. Recall that even as of a few years ago, the George Mason survey of climate scientists showed that over half of them thought that there would be warming, but only non-catastrophic levels of warming, by the end of the century. The recent AR5 “stealth modification” means that, if re-polled today, the numbers here would probably have risen to something like 2/3 of all climate scientists thinking there will be damaging but non-catastrophic warming , as few as 20% still believing in catastrophic warming, and a growing minority thinking that there will not even be damaging warming or no warming at all. This is reflected by the free-fall in climate sensitivity, down from order of 2.5 C in AR5 to many estimates under 2 C in late 2013. By 2017, with no warming, these will be falling to non-catastrophic 1.2-1.5 C, basically no water vapor feedback at all, and large uncertainties due to an obviously much larger role of natural variability.
AR6 could well be the final assessment report produced by the IPCC as they are being summarily disbanded and massively defunded. That’s on the far side of the 2016 presidential elections, and no matter who runs for either party, they are going to have to back off CAGW if there has been no meaningful warming by early 2016, two years from now or worse, if there is an actual weak cooling trend, regrowth of arctic ice, etc. By 2017, heads will be rolling. That’s why we are seeing AR5 backing off after the fact. The “cold” reality of the matter is that Trenberth, Schmidt, Jones, Hansen and all of the rest can see the writing on the wall. They are already hoist on the petard of their own egregious past predictions and words. They cannot artificially boost ground surface temperatures derived from UHI-maniplated thermometers as they are constrained by independent LTT measurements and ever better tools supporting truly global satellite measurements of surface temperatures. The trick of pretending that every extreme weather event is evidence of CACC (as opposed to CAGW) is played out — too many people are calling them this even in the scientific community.
If they cannot point to some published science that agrees with neutral warming over 20 year, their objectivity will be called into question, and not just on WUWT, this will be a mainstream event as everybody’s funding is going to depend on whether or not they were deliberately misleading the public. Expect to see a lot of publications this year where people who have for years unambiguously taken CAGW and high climate sensitivity as a given to subtly back off to a fence-sitting posture where they still call for AGW, but start to openly acknowledge that it could end up being only a degree plus, not two degrees or more plus. In other words, objectivity will break out all over so that researchers have a track record of some objective consideration of the possibility of non-catastrophic AGW with low climate sensitivity before the peasants arrive with pitchforks and torches, or before Republicans arrive with subpoenas and the threat of being found in contempt of congress in previous testimony.
In other words, climate scientists who have spoken out confidently for catastrophic warming are suddenly realizing that they might actually be held accountable for their conclusions, and not just in scientific journals. Those who live by the political sword die by the political sword, and the ivory tower quite rightly hold no protection for those who have used science as a cloak for making statements outside of the reasonable confidence that can be attributed to the predictions of unproven theories and unvalidated computational models. Which is “low”, in case there is any doubt.
The worst case scenario for them is actually the best-case scenario for the science. A number of recent papers are uncovering an actual scientific basis for errors in the GCMs, e.g. errors in the treatment of thunderstorms as vertical advection penetration of heat through the greenhouse layer to where one has regionally enhanced cooling at a globally significant level, the discovery that things like stratospheric water vapor can vary by over 10% on a remarkably short time scale for reasons unknown (with truly significant modulation of greenhouse warming, modulation that can actually be semi-permanent if the decrease in water vapor proves to be perisistent), with the discovery that aerosol physics and soot are almost certainly incorrectly treated in many of the GCMs if not most. If somebody writes, or rewrites, some of the GCMs so that they predict the recent temperature hiatus as being probable instead of improbable in their per-model ensemble runs, while still using physics-based models (just with improved physics) then the science itself will be rescued even as those who placed overmuch reliance in the results of early models are marginalized.
Hansen has already been marginalized. Jones has to be worried. Schmidt is vulnerable. Some of these folks actually HAVE a track record of being far more reasonable and conservative about what the predicted pre-1998, pre-Mann, when Hansen, the IPCC and the Green crowd took over the science and made it a global issue to replace war as a UN issue and to (very sadly indeed) displace global poverty, religious conflict, and ignorance as the most important issues facing the world. I think Jones has long since realized that he was wrong but has no way to say so publicly that isn’t committing seppuku, so he keeps praying for potentially disastrous warming to recommence even as he realizes that it probably won’t, at least not during his career lifetime. I think Trenberth is actively backing off as we speak — last I heard he was calling for only 35 cm or thereabouts of SLR by 2100 — far too much to support by direct evidence, but way, way down from Hansen’s TED Talks public assertion of five meters of SLR by 2100. Even as he looks for missing heat, he realizes that if he finds it in the deep ocean, it actually means that there will be no catastrophic warming in the next century — it is good news for the world, not the bad. And then he has to be just as aware as anyone else that climate sensitivity is probably a lot lower than the early GCMs predicted, the role of the natural decadal oscillations and the sun a lot larger than they account for even now, and that feedbacks from water vapor and clouds could even turn out to be net negative even as they very plausibly change the distribution of global temperatures and rainfall patterns.
Over the next decade ARGOS and improvements on CERES are going to tell us a lot, and do so in ways that completely resolve (prove or disprove) many of the assumptions concerning radiative balance. Everybody knows it, and is suddenly realizing that their “confident” assertions from the last two decades are about to be in the position of being falsified, in detail, not by sloppy things like incorrect predictions of upper troposphere warming, incorrect predictions of global warming, but by actual measured failures in the supposed heating of the ocean, in measured failures in the TOA variation of upwelling spectrally distributed intensity or (worse) albedo.
We are also reaching a point in many countries where personal weather stations connected to e.g. the Weather Underground achieve sufficient numbers and detail to precisely map the UHI effect, map it to where precise corrections become possible in at least much of the United States if not Europe. I actually suspect that they are already there, although collecting the data and processing it as a set of anomaly isotherms surrounding urban centers is probably still difficult. I’m pretty happy to bet that we are getting to where we can actually compute regional isotherms, corrected for geography, on top of smoothed population density maps and make quite accurate inferences, though.
rgb

Yet another time — Piazza is a tool I use in teaching physics. It facilitates blog-like discussions of specific questions. It can correctly translate inline latex wrapped in $$ pairs, so that $$\vec{F} = v\vec{a}$$ is Newton’s Second Law. It has a built in preview — you can check your replies, including all rendered latex as well as trivially embedded graphics. Webassign (another tool I use) can handle tagged latex as well, and again there is ownership of individual posts so I can edit what I say even after it is posted. Goodreads is a reading blog — actual blog software — that permits previewing one’s post, editing one’s own post, and a lot more, all easily and conveniently. No latex, but then it isn’t a science blog tool.
There are things like http://www.mathjax.org/, javascript tools that permit the embedding and display of mathml and/or latex into rather generic blog engines. I pray for WUWT to aggressively pursue this sort of thing. It is a real pain in the ass to try to write in a science-related blog without either preview or a proper latex/mathml/mathematica interface. And this isn’t the only such tool. Surely something out there would enable graphics, math, previewing, after-post editing by the submitter (and moderator(s))?
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rgb:
Thanks for the excellent summarization. I wanted to second your assessment of “unjustified confidence”. It is one of the most egregious violations of the scientific method to falsify the significance of the supporting evidence. Claiming a level of confidence, that is unjustified, is undermining the “level of confidence” the public has in its institutions. The difference between civil society and anarchy, is the level of trust, that the public maintains for the “ruling class”. If those at the top, are not punished for violations of public trust, you can be sure, the public is not going to abide by the behavioral norms, that make society function.
It will get worse, before it gets better. There are still a significant number, of otherwise intelligent individuals, with there eyes shut and there fingers in their ears, praying for a massive “El Nino” this summer. It will make a good thesis on “mass psychosis”, for some future dissertation.
I hate to think where we would be, without the numerous internet sites, that have weathered withering condemnation from the “climate aristocracy”.
It will at least be a lesson, to others, that want the celebrity that comes from setting off the “fire alarm” when you think, you might, smell a puff of smoke.

1971 according to NASA, consensus man made climate change is absurd: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/1971-consensus-mann-made-climate-change-is-absurd/