New study says 'robust modeling' predicted Antarctic sea ice to decrease, but the ice defies modeling

For the latter, the issue is reconciling the observed expansion of Antarctic sea ice extent during the satellite era with robust modeling evidence that the ice should melt as a result of stratospheric ozone depletion (and increases in GHGs).
Modeling is evidence. :facepalm Only in an alternate universe, eh?
And pish on ozone depletion and ozone recovery. What proof do they have that what’s happening with ozone isn’t part of a natural cycle?

Ken Hall says:
January 23, 2014 at 12:46 am
The biggest mistake Climate scientists make, is believing that their models are a suitable replacement for real experimentation and observation.
==============================================================
Ken, they done did their misdeed on purpose, so it wernt no mistake.

My understanding is, if the tropics are warming due to less cloud cover, then the Antarctic will cool due to reflection of the incoming radiation by the snow and ice. It appears that any global warming is due to a lack of cloud cover, rather than increased cloud cover due to the GHG affect.

I would question their assertion that ozone is somehow responsible for what the Southern Hemisphere is doing with its weather patterns.
I think this is likely more post hoc rationalization for the failure of yet another AGW prediction.

“Were the authors of the study advisors to the recent ‘Spirit of Mawson’ tourist (cough) cruise to the Antarctic that got trapped in the ice that wasn’t there?”
http://tinyurl.com/p83o6vb

Despite lingering uncertainties, it has become clear that ozone depletion has been instrumental in driving SH climate change in recent decades. Similarly, ozone recovery will figure prominently in future climate change, with its impacts expected to largely cancel the impacts of increasing GHGs during the next half-century
Where does this cr$p come from ? I have never seen convincing evidence for that statement for for the fact that CFCs deplete the O3.

Another Nature article composed almost entirely of falsehoods. It’s getting boring.

Phillip Bratby says: @ January 23, 2014 at 1:43 am
“Robust modeling evidence”. Is it 1st April?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No, I think we are now living in Orwell’s superstate Oceania and the Ministry of Truth has been busy again.
After all given the amount of truth we see in the MSM we would never know if the USA or the EU has ceased to exist.

Mother nature is in the pay of Big Oil.

Idiots et al peer reviewed, and published, another excuse, this time it is ozone hiding global warming. So is the missing heat hiding in the deep ocean? or has it been overcome by ozone.
These people some how have no logic, or capacity to think out side a cocoon of their own making. Maybe they are just a few sheep short in the top paddock.
Just thinking out loud here, but when the climate castle crumbles people like these will need help to cope with reality.

Mods can you fish my last post out of the ether? (It has been an hour)

A model is as good as the input but always need a reality check.

Now I personally think that the models are, in fact, all spot on…cos,
Bits of the Arctic are actually breaking off as it melts and are slipping down the world to the Antarctic which explains perfectly why the top bit is shrinking and the bottom bit is growing…..
Wotufink?…eh?…eh?

Gail,
That is interesting food for thought. However, I would question the linkage of solar minimum and UV, for one thing. And the ozone hole relates to winter more than anything. Winter, when very little light is reaching the area anyway.

wayne Job says: @ January 23, 2014 at 3:05 am
… These people some how have no logic, or capacity to think out side a cocoon of their own making. Maybe they are just a few sheep short in the top paddock.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So THATS why I get all these extra sheep showing up every spring. I wonder which ones I should return to Mikey Mann, Gavin and Hansen…. :>)
Mean while another comment is visiting with Trenbeth’s missing heat. (That heat must be magnetic or something.)

Climate System Response to Stratospheric Ozone Depletion and Recovery
http://www.columbia.edu/~lmp/paps/previdi+polvani-QJRMS-2014-inpress.pdf

@ Ronald “A model is as good as the input but always need a reality check.”
At its very best a model is as good as the input — and that is assuming that the model is both complete and accurate.
A model is nothing more than a thought experiment. For most models the thought experiment is so complicated or requires so many bits of data that a human cannot do the experiment in his head — hence the computer program. Imagine how the CAGW cultists would respond to a sceptic with this claim: “I have developed a thought experiment that proves CO2 is not a major factor in climate. The experiment is so complicated that no one can understand all of it, but I have written a program to do the hard parts. My thought experiment is very robust and conclusive.”
Computer modeling = automated thought experiment

Actually, this is good news. Didn’t anybody notice the last line? Ozone recovery will largely cancel AGW over the next half-century! Perhaps this is the “missing heat”! Maybe Ozone has started to recover, causing the pause. Or perhaps it is other probably ignored stratospheric changes, such as its sudden 10% depletion in water vapor content, making it considerably more transparent in the water band.
But yes, in the end it is just one more nail in the coffin of the GCMs, still more evidence that they omit or do not get key physics components right and/or do not have the spatiotemporal resolution at accessible model granularity to get the climate right. Since stratospheric Ozone is actually plausibly connected to solar magnetic state and the prevalence of upper-atmosphere ionizing radiation, this might even be one of the missing links to a causal link between the Sun and the climate.
I don’t see anything particularly bad about this paper or abstract. Indeed, it is basically consistent with observation. The GCMs predict something that isn’t observationally happening, so they have a problem. We knew that; it is good to see it in print. The resolution of the problem suggests that AGW previously attributed to GHGs was in part attributable to ozone depletion instead, and that as ozone recovers, it will largely cancel the residual warming due to increasing GHGs for a period of several decades. We didn’t know that, but it makes some degree of sense (and note well, I haven’t attributed any cause for the ozone depletion in the first place) and is great news! It should be reprinted as a headline on the front page of the New York Times! Of course if it were, the authors would be eviscerated by their colleagues for inadvertently breaking ranks and putting all of that funding at risk. All that is missing is a causal model for the ozone and its incorporation into repaired GCMs, which will presumably have substantially lower GHG forcing (because stratospheric ozone will have to take on a larger role in the past, CO_2 will have to take on a smaller one to describe the same data) and completely different feedbacks. Natural variation will likely play a larger role, because humans were not the sole cause of the ozone hole in the first place — there is (IIRC) isotopic evidence that ozone follows a natural cycle of variability that may or may not be linked to solar state. We may have exacerbated or overdriven a natural cycle with our stratospheric jets and CFCs (or not, I don’t care to get into that debate) but there is little doubt that a natural cycle exists and is probably driven by some sort of atmospheric chemistry beyond our control.
By the way, I do so wish that people wouldn’t bad-mouth modelling in general. There are many, many systems in the world that can be successfully modelled and modelling those systems is of enormous value to humanity. We model jets before we build them. We model nuclear bombs as part of the design process before we build them. We model the spread of disease in epidemics, we model phase transitions and critical phenomena in physics, we model chemical reactions. These days no electric circuit is ever built (for mass production, not by hobbyists) without being modelled first. There is absolutely nothing wrong with modelling and using models to predict the future of complex systems.
The problem is that in all of the cases cited above, the models in question are validated, and the process of model validation basically never ends. Even a model that has worked in the past is subject to scrutiny if it fails to work in the future, and its future predictions are very much subject to doubt to the extent that it does so fail. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with trying to build GCMs — indeed variations of GCMs work pretty well nowadays to model the weather up to two weeks in advance, which is (given the difficulty of the process) a tremendous achievement and one that is critically valuable. I know, for example, that the current cold weather we are having in NC this morning (temperatures in the mid-teens, bitter cold for this time of year) is very probably going to last for two weeks or more, thanks to models. They could be wrong, of course, but they are probably right, right enough for me to “expect” to need to de-ice my car windshield in the mornings and allow for the extra time.
The problem with GCMs used to predict the climate isn’t that “modelling is bad”, it is that “these particular models are bad”. Not bad in intent, maybe not even bad in execution — they best we can do is never “bad”, although it may be “inadequate”. Bad in the specific sense that the GCMs are not working to predict the climate.
This isn’t really that surprising. Predicting the climate one lousy year out is an enormously difficult problem, arguably the most difficult computational problem the human species has yet attempted. It may quite literally not be solvable given our current computational resources. It may be solvable, but may require the substantial rewrite of the code being used, and the solution may have such a broad range of possible future climates that we cannot resolve the probability of any particular future from the spaghetti snarl of butterfly-wing perturbed possibilities, so that the solutions may not be useful.
In any other field, that is just science as usual, nobody would say “models are bad” just because models were not yet useful or any particular model failed to work. In climate science, because these unproven models have been elevated to the status of some sort of modern Oracle and corrupted to the dual purpose of a political agenda and the preservation of climate science funding, it is a problem.
rgb

rgbatduke says: @ January 23, 2014 at 6:29 am
…. By the way, I do so wish that people wouldn’t bad-mouth modelling in general….
In any other field, that is just science as usual, nobody would say “models are bad” just because models were not yet useful or any particular model failed to work. In climate science, because these unproven models have been elevated to the status of some sort of modern Oracle and corrupted to the dual purpose of a political agenda and the preservation of climate science funding, it is a problem.
rgb
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The problem is the climate models are not fit for use but they have been used to direct policy around the world. As a result there are 30,000 extra deaths a year in the EU due to foolish government policy based on Bad Climate Models.
In general the man on the street is only going to know the politicians made a really big error that directly affects him and scientists and their models are to blame.
Do not expect people to stop bad-mouth modelling because it is only going to get worse.
As a chemist, I hate the fact people say ‘Chemicals’ are bad/evil but there isn’t much that can be done. All we can hope is that the name of ‘Science’ isn’t too badly trashed. There are Luddites on both the right and the left who want to ump on the name of science with both feet.

@ Phil. says:
January 23, 2014 at 6:21 am
RE: Your assertion the ozone layer is concentrated at the bottom of the Stratoshpere.
Please tell NASA to update their explanation .
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/SH.html
“The total mass of ozone in the atmosphere is about 3 billion metric tons. That may seem like a lot, but it is only 0.00006 percent of the atmosphere. The peak concentration of ozone occurs at an altitude of roughly 32 kilometers (20 miles) above the surface of the Earth. At that altitude, ozone concentration can be as high as 15 parts per million (0.0015 percent). “

Sorry, hit submit again too quickly.
Phil,
You are of course correct regarding when the “hole” is at its greatest extent. Thank you for correcting the seasons.
The question that still comes to mind is why the 1950’s Internatinal Geophysical year talked about noticing the intensification of UV prior to CFC’s becomins so prevalent?

NO, No, No, No, No, No, No!
Nearly ten years ago, NASA was soo on this one! They concluded
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/sea_ice.html
See there, “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” = MORE Antarctic Sea Ice.
The growing Ice isn’t their problem.
…now they do have a problem though. And that problem is, Antarctica hasn’t seen the, you know, “Warming” part since at least 1957
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_700890090000_14_0/station.txt
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/polar-amplification-at-the-south-pole/
Of course, if we were merely talking about their “models” though – well then yeah, Models are 0 for 2 (huge swings and misses for both -Ice and +Warming)

“robust modeling evidence”
There are two opposite definitions of “robust”:
1) robust – strong enough to withstand or overcome intellectual challenges or adversity
2) robust – rough and crude
So take your pick. I choose #2 it just makes more sense in this case.

Antarctica is a huge continent, the SIZE of the continental United States. While high altitudes in Antarctica are gaining more snow & ice the vast West Antarctic ice sheet is melting. Models are not needed to see the reality of a rising ocean. Antarctica’s melting is now beginning to contribute to this rising ocean. THIS is taking place right now. Whereas in the Dakotas it can be 20 below zero with a good deal of snow one can go to Arizona, New Mexico and California where there is no snow and a multi-year drought is in progress.

rgbatduke says:
‘In any other field, that is just science as usual, nobody would say “models are bad” just because models were not yet useful or any particular model failed to work. In climate science, because these unproven models have been elevated to the status of some sort of modern Oracle and corrupted to the dual purpose of a political agenda and the preservation of climate science funding, it is a problem.’
—
In principle, you are right – models as such are not evil. However, I see some misplaced confidence in models, and a lack of rigour in comparing them to reality in other fields of science also. This is something that puzzled and worried me even before I learned and understood anything about the global warming question.

The models show that the temperatures around Antarctica are pleasantly warm, and yet the observations suggest that the ice isn’t melting as it should. Clearly, then, something is raising the melting point of the ice. It might be a side effect of the atmosphere being half-full of CO2, but my guess is that the Koch brothers are spraying some weird chemical onto the ice

How do we know that the ozone hole hasn’t always been there?