Note: This is a repost from Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog entry last Friday. I’ve done so because it needs the wide distribution that WUWT can offer. The one graph he has produced (see below) says it all. I suggest readers use their social media tools to share this far and wide. – Anthony
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
I’m seeing a lot of wrangling over the recent (15+ year) pause in global average warming…when did it start, is it a full pause, shouldn’t we be taking the longer view, etc.
These are all interesting exercises, but they miss the most important point: the climate models that governments base policy decisions on have failed miserably.
I’ve updated our comparison of 90 climate models versus observations for global average surface temperatures through 2013, and we still see that >95% of the models have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH):
Whether humans are the cause of 100% of the observed warming or not, the conclusion is that global warming isn’t as bad as was predicted. That should have major policy implications…assuming policy is still informed by facts more than emotions and political aspirations.
And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats.
I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or “97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming”, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good.
Yet, that is the direction we are heading.
And even if the extra energy is being stored in the deep ocean (if you have faith in long-term measured warming trends of thousandths or hundredths of a degree), I say “great!”. Because that extra heat is in the form of a tiny temperature change spread throughout an unimaginably large heat sink, which can never have an appreciable effect on future surface climate.
If the deep ocean ends up averaging 4.1 deg. C, rather than 4.0 deg. C, it won’t really matter.
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AGW is warmist “sciences” Ponzi scheme.
It’s not as bad as we thought.
Mistakes were made.
But politically, is it yet worth saying “Don’t Panic”?
“Don’t Panic” sounds like poor guidance (to the fearful and ignorant at least).
Thank you Dr. Spencer.
I love that spaghetti graph.
News Flash!……
Hidden unmeasurable heat causes snow….and polar vortexes
…film at 11
95% of climate models agree that they totally missed predicting real temperatures and are unfit for their intended purpose. A large portion of them never even at their lowest projected temperature limit even touch real world measured temperatures.
I think the project proposed in another thread recently to identify and black list the incompetent models and toss out the fraction that never even achieve bad predictions should be pushed forward with all possible speed.
If over a time span of 16 years a plot of the model never once crosses the plot of real measured temperatures it obviously is a completely incompetent model and not worth the power bill to run its simulations. It only serves to inflate the range of predictions toward the warm side, and serves no other useful purpose.
Ah!! That pesky Mother Nature!! She is SUCH a denier.
A bad model is a bad model is a bad model. They are failing to prove their point and need to go back to square one.
Larry Ledwick says:
February 10, 2014 at 12:10 pm
…. 95% of climate models agree that they totally missed predicting real temperatures and are unfit for their intended purpose. A large portion of them never even at their lowest projected temperature limit even touch real world measured temperatures.
I think the project proposed in another thread recently to identify and black list the incompetent models and toss out the fraction that never even achieve bad predictions should be pushed forward with all possible speed.
=============
That fraction that you would “toss out” would be 95/100 or 95%. Sounds good to me.
It would be nice to have an image where you could de-select plots for certain models so people could see how the ensemble of model predictions changes as you drop the worst models from the plot. If a model was consistently biased toward the warm side it would presumably grow more and more out of touch with real world temps. If you could drop the worst 10% worst 20% and worst 50% of the model and do a visible comparison (animated gif?) it would be a great visual tool to show people how bad some of the models are.
The best would be something like wood for trees where you could select and de-select model runs at will to see what was even in the same ball park as reality.
A quick calibrated eyeball evaluation of that mess of spaghetti seems to me that only about 5 or 6 are even in the running for reasonable approximations of reality.
Friends:
It seems sensible to copy two posts from the thread discussing the superb article by Roger A. Pielke Sr. It is here.
The first post I here quote was from Roger A. Pielke Sr. in reply to me and says
——————
Roger A. Pielke Sr. says:
February 8, 2014 at 2:40 pm
Hi Richard
Thank you for your follow up. We are in complete agreement, as you wrote, that
Hence, the models are excellent heuristic tools. And they should be used as such.
But there is no reason to suppose that any of them is a predictive tool. And averaging model predictions (e.g. CMIP5) is an error because average wrong is wrong.”
The bottom line, based on our perspective of the models, is that IPCC Annex 1 results are fundamentally flawed..
Roger
——————
The importance of that “bottom line” is the subject of this thread, and is spelled-out in the second post I copy from that thread which is from me to dbstealey.
———————
richardscourtney says:
February 8, 2014 at 3:35 pm
dbstealey:
In your post at February 8, 2014 at 3:16 pm you say
Indeed so.
I point out that
(a) in this thread we are discussing that the climate models are being used as predictive tools when they have no demonstrated predictive skill
and
(b) in another thread we are discussing that the statistical methods used by so-called ‘climate science’ are not fit for purpose
and
(c) in past threads we have discussed the problems with acquisition of climate data notably GASTA
and
(d) in another thread there is discussion of climate sensitivity which is a reflection of the problem of an inadequate theory of climate change.
Simply, the only thing about climate which is known with certainty is that nothing about climate behaviour is known with sufficient certainty to assist policy making. It is better to have no information than to be influenced by wrong information when formulating policy.
Richard
______________________________
Richard
To expand further on Larry Ledwick’s comment above. How about attaching the names of the so-called “climate scientists” to their individual model plots with a comparison of the observed data.
That would probably be cause for alarm within the ranks for the “cause”.
“If the deep ocean ends up averaging 4.1 deg. C, rather than 4.0 deg. C, it won’t really matter.”
First, I’m a CAGW skeptic, so you’re singing to the choir here a little, but when I see things like the statement above in quotes, I cringe.
REALLY?
How do you know it won’t really matter? Have you done a dynamic energy balance study?
Can you cite a peer reviewed reference that shows we can dump 10^22 joules of energy every year into the ocean and it won’t really matter? It won’t change circulation? It won’t cause long-term adverse effects in the thermohaline cycle?
I would love to see this reference and be convinced, because it would be a great way to defuse the whole CAWG meme.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the model runs documented by the IPCC were not alone. Other model runs — thousands of them — no doubt showed reasonable temperature spans into the future. But those runs were tossed out, never shown, as they were not ideologically correct.
We think of a model run as “put in the parameters, let it run and see what comes out.” But in fact, it is an iterative process, run over and over again with tweaks to the “immutable physics” and “known observations” and continuous “tuning” of various algorithms to produce a result that makes the modelers happy.
Only then does it get published. We see only this final result. The Harry_Read_Me.txt file and other ClimateGate documents show a lot of “behind the scenes” tweaks and bodges to the input to produce the desired output from models.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Can’t remember who did the clip, but they examined the temperature record. They exposed that the warmists had actually tilted the x axis back, so they could show the graph as rising. They did not start at zero ( start point 1978) but below zero to accentuate the rise ( hahaha).
With all that, the temperature was still the same in 2013 as 1978. The debunkers of this graph also noted that 1978 was chosen as the starting point because it was when the world is going to freeze scare started.
Those were among many other faults with the graph.
Point is that anyone that believes in the graphs the models produce is being well and truly suckered.
Who runs the 4 models that are at or below UAH?
The politics and Press are shameful.
How many people know England lost 30,000 elderly to last winter’s cold? There is Socialism for you.
How many people know South Dakota lost 20,000 head of cattle and thousands of other farm animals to a snow blizzard storm in October 2013?
How many people know New Zealand and Scotland lost thousands of lambs due to early winter storms?
Now, northern Indian Reservations and I assume non-reservation are short on propane gas. The number of people without electric is now lapsing over to the next storm
The death toll is piling up while the Media including FOX fail to report the lost of life due to a colder period from a sunspot minimum.
Instead of in bracing what is going on the media and the US government is in goose step March right down the road to destruction with the hypothesis of Man-Made Global Warming.
Shameful.
Paul Pierett
MattS: “Who runs the 4 models that are at or below UAH?”
Great observation and great question.
Don’t be surprised if those “Who” suddenly disappear once AGW Climate Cabal gets wind of their models. The AGW CC can’t have any dissenting views, especially models that potentially go along with Mother Nature… 😉
Ok, I have to ask. Why does the graph being in 1983, but the label says “(’79-2013)”? Anyone?
I believe it is due to the plot being a running 5 year mean so it begins 5 years after the data begins.
Walter Allensworth:
Your post at February 10, 2014 at 12:34 pm
Why do you want a reference? Do you accept everything you are told?
You have a brain, why not use it instead of accepting things that are “referenced” to someone else?
The thermal capacity of water is more than a thousand times greater than the thermal capacity of air. So, heat that goes into the ocean raises the ocean temperature much less than if it had gone into the air.
The transfer of heat is from hot to cold. So, a tiny rise in ocean temperature makes little or no difference to the rate at which the oceans can release heat to the air. In other words, if heat is being pumped into the oceans (and there is NO evidence that it is) then that effectively removes that heat as a possible cause of discernible global warming.
In other words, “If the deep ocean ends up averaging 4.1 deg. C, rather than 4.0 deg. C, it won’t really matter” because it can’t.
Richard
“Simply, the only thing about climate which is known with certainty is that nothing about climate behaviour is known with sufficient certainty to assist policy making.”
well, that bears some skepticism.
The person who gets to decide if a wrong model is still useful is NOT a blog commenter.
The person who gets to decide is a policy maker.
Suppose I am a policy maker. Policy making is not science. Policy making can be guided by science or informed by science, but in the end it not making hypotheses and predictions.
It’s making decisions based on many factors: science, economics, self interest, lobbying, principles, constituents interests, bribes, etc
As a policy maker I am well within my rights to look at model that is biased high and STILL USE IT
For example. Suppose I ask you to predict sea level rise in the next 100 years.
Party A, tells me to extrapolate from the past and to expect 20cm rise.
Climate modeller tells me to expect 1meter.
Historian tells me that the past has seen sea levels at least 20 meters above the current.
All of these can assist the policy maker. None of them can DETERMINE policy with the iron fist of logic or the soft prod from induction. None of them spits out a policy. In the end the policy maker will have to weigh the uncertainty of each of these disciplines and the costs and benefits.
A cautious policy maker may look at history and argue that he wants to be really safe
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall–village-left-untouched-tsunami.html
Blog commenters do not get tell policy makers what information assists them.
David in Texas says:
February 10, 2014 at 12:51 pm
Ok, I have to ask. Why does the graph being in 1983, but the label says “(’79-2013)”? Anyone?
*********************
Perhaps because the graph has 5-year running means? The first such mean from data beginning in 1979 would be 1983.
Two questions:
1. Spencer states: “we still see that >95% of the models have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979”. Why does the chart have a start date of 1983 rather than 1979?
2. Is one of the RCP scenarios being modeled here (e.g. RCP 4.5, RCP 6, RCP 8.5)? If not, what GHG concentration data are being fed into the models? How do those concentrations compare to the actual observed conditions?
It is articles like this that make me not completely give up on WUWT
– an actual professional scientist has done some analysis..
Here is another one that you linked to in the weekly round up
– it contains a fairly similar message – the models are over cooked…
http://www.c3headlines.com/2014/01/2013-nasa-hansen-climate-model-prediction-global-warming-reality-those-stubborn-facts.html
Both worthwhile, IMHO…
– unlike, ahem, this drivel..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/07/friday-funny-two-guys-with-a-ruler-blow-up-the-white-house-global-warming-video-claims/
– IMO, publishing mindless drivel like this one, which some may find humorous (I don’t because it’s just too moronic for my tastes), dilutes the more intelligent content of WUWT….
I appreciate the honestly of this graph. Though many have said there has been no increase in temperature in the last 15 years, this graph actually shows differently, no?
I’m no alarmist but it shows between a .2 and .3 increase. Over 100 years, if that is constant, we’re talking almost a 2 degree Celsius difference, no? And that’s if it says steady. There’s every reason to believe it could increase more when the sun starts showing more activity.
I mention this out of wonderment and not out of being contrary. I’d love an explanation of how people are saying the temp hasn’t changed and how we shouldn’t be worried about this continuing. Thank you!