“The Models didn’t have the skill we thought they had…”
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian, a prominent green UK daily newspaper, reports that scientists have given up on surface temperature as a measure of global warming:
Stephen Briggs from the European Space Agency’s Directorate of Earth Observation says that sea surface temperature data is the worst indicator of global climate that can be used, describing it as “lousy”.
“It is like looking at the last hair on the tail of a dog and trying to decide what breed it is,” he said on Friday at the Royal Society in London.
“The models don’t have the skill we thought they had. That’s the problem,” admits Peter Jan van Leeuwen, director of the National Centre of Earth Observation at the University of Reading.
Obviously if the surface temperature was still rising, as it was in the 90s, instead of inconveniently contradicting model predictions, then it would still be considered a valid climate metric.
Thankfully however, climate scientists have not yet run out of metrics which show an upward trend. The new measure of global warming is to be sea level rise – presumably because it is still moving in the right direction, and because it ties in nicely with the “deep ocean heating” narrative.
The inconvenient fact that sea level was around 6 metres higher during the Eemian Interglacial, and around 2 metres higher during the Holocene Optimum, 5500 years ago, was not mentioned in the Guardian article.
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/ericg/kap_paper.pdf
The European Union is supportive of the effort to find climate metrics which point in the right direction – The Esa Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is a €75m programme, active since 2009, to produce a “trustworthy” set of ECV (Essential Climate Variable) data that can be accessed by all.
=============================================================
The guardian story is here: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/13/pause-global-warming-data-sea-level-rises
[note: there was an error in HTML coding that made the entire article look like a quote when that was not intended, that has been fixed – mod]
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Of course they’ve given up on sea surface temperature data, its not behaving itself.
“Climate scientists have been arguing for some time that the lack of warming of the sea surface is due to most of the extra heat being taken up by the deep ocean. ”
The rate of increase ( in the very limited data) has not changed for 40-50 years.
And there is no inconvenient data from 20s or 30s or 40s to prove them wrong.
Ronald DeWitt says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:55 am
I suggest that we begin to use the yield per acre for corn crops. I read somewhere that it has been rising consistently and could well be an effect of climate change.
______
This is an excellent idea, and if ever we don’t see a rise in yield there’s always a new breed to be introduced.
Oh Dear, this grizzled engineer says that the models are crap because they’re based on juvenile physics, originating with Carl Sagan.
The real operational emissivity of the Earth’s surface is c. 0.4, mostly the ‘atmospheric window’. This plus the stupid application of Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation at ToA, to a semi-transparent atmosphere (think about it) means surface heating has been exaggerated by 60^ with the IR part exaggerated 5.1x. No wonder they thought there’d be ‘positive feedback’ etc., but they cheat by using double low level cloud optical depth in hind-casting!
Go into it further and the atmosphere self-adapts. One day, I’ll reveal why!
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/05/the-great-dying-of-thermometers/
Over the years the temperature data has been poked, prodded and tortured in every imaginable way to come up with a result that is now considered ‘lousy’.
Tea leaves?
The fact that sea level has been far higher in the past is no cause for complacency. On the contrary, it shows that the range of states that our planet’s climate can adopt includes many that would be rather inconvenient to a civilisation that has so far only experienced a very narrow central range of possible temperatures and sea levels, and has responded by building masses of important infrastructure within a few meters of the current sea level.
I’m sure the honourable Lord Monckton would know the appropriate Latin term for this type of false logic.
..and when they discover they got sea levels wrong
It will be pikas, cherry blossoms, and frog farts……..
This isn’t moving the goal posts, it’s moving the whole stadium.
This post could make a useful contribution. Unfortunately it is marred by poor presentation.
Putting the words ‘lousy data’ in quotation marks is a big problem for me. The fact that the Guardian headline writer wanted to distort the truth is no excuse. Really, we need scrupulous standards of truth. If the best you can aspire to is the standards of the Guardian the I’m not that interested in reading what you have to say.
To be precise Stephen Briggs described sea surface temperature as a lousy ‘indicator of global climate’.
It may be that the data is itself lousy, in the sense of too full of errors to tell us much about real sea surface temperatures. But that is not what Stephen Briggs was talking about, and the Guardian article did not provide any evidence for that.
If you want to make the case that sea surface temperature data is lousy, then go ahead. I’ll be interested to hear the case. But I just can’t see any support for that in the article you linked to.
I think it would also have aided clarity if you had ended the italics two paragraphs earlier. Your presentation seems to have given some readers, such as Old Huemul at 8.17 that these paragraphs appear in the original article.
(Otherwise I can’t quite understand Old Huemel’s comment – where is the ‘open admission’?)
@ur momisugly TAG says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:57 am
Sorry, but I beg to differ. Warming is not a problem. Warming would, if history is anything to go by, be beneficial. Note that during the last warming of consequence, Vikings were able to set up shop on Greenland. Please note their current absence as evidence that cooling is more deadly than warming.
It’s a fact of nature that climate changes. But a group of people have created a “crisis” out of it this self-evident fact, because as long as there’s a crisis, people can work it: politicians, rent-seeking corporations, non-profits, lobbying firms, universities. It’s big business. Cold will kill more than warming. Yet all the while, governments waste billions and billions and TIME “studying” the wrong thing. Looked at from a practical perspective, who cares whether it’s getting warmer or colder at this very moment, if we’re smart enough to deal with either contingency? Especially since if it IS warming or cooling, it’s not bleedin’ likely it’ll change catastrophically overnight, so if we know what to do, we have time to do it? All this money could’ve been spent studying how to cope with either situation—and THAT would’ve been an investment, money well spent, because it’s knowledge and research that would pay off. But no: all that money spent on idiotic, computerized ouija boards which only “predict” what they’ve been programmed to show, all trying to prove, against all evidence, that the sky really IS falling. By comparison, a total dearth of studies about what do to in the event of. And lots of Paul Erhlich-types, like Algore, crying doom, and making prophesies that uniformly fail of promise. Of what use is that? Especially if they’re right?
The article claims there are only 50 ECVs (essential climate variables). Precisely. Color me sceptical: if we knew what the variables were with such precision, why are the computer models so very far off? If we know them with such precision, which ones are responsible for the lack of warming? Why did they not know that the surface temperature ECV was a waste of time if they knew what all of the variables were? As a previous generation might phrase it: poppycock. No one “knows” what all the variables are. But we DO know that their computer models don’t take all of even what we do think we know into account.
Small surprise that most of the article was devoted to their next attempts at creating a computer model. Not, you’ll note, “Why are our current models so very wrong?” They never even admitted their models are wrong—
“No, it HAS to be the metric we’ve chosen, not our models, so we’ll choose something that appears to agree with our models and just keep on crying doom.”
IMHO, Warming is not a problem, though it does present some challenges. Tant pis Adapting to future conditions is a challenge, period. Cooling would present greater challenges. But greedy, short-sighted, venal “scientists” and politicians and non-profits and the like—THEY are the problem.
Interesting sentiment displayed here. “Scientists” are “thankful” for a “warming trend”. Why? I think that shows you all you need to know. They are “thankful” that a specific result is being shown rather than simply striving to see what is happening? That right there was a slip of the mask that shows they have an agenda and are not engaged in science. Science should not be “thankful” of a particular result.
“The inconvenient fact that sea level was around 6 metres higher during the Eemian Interglacial, and around 2 metres higher during the Holocene Optimum, 5500 years ago, was not mentioned in the Guardian article.
At the current rate of 8-12″ per century it will take 6-900 years to get to the level of 6Kya, assuming SL is really rising long term. Of course, accumulating more polar ice reduces sea level, so it could also be that long term we are cooling, and the oceans are diminishing, as we exit this interglacial.
Nigel Harris:
In your post at June 14, 2014 at 8:51 am you respond to failure of the climate models.
You say
At June 14, 2014 at 7:57 am TAG presented similar unfounded and evidence-free assertion that the failure to predict what will happen as a result of GHG emissions provides risk that the results of the emissions will be even worse.
There is no need to use Latin when looking for a definition of the logical fallacy you present.
In English your illogical assertion is called idiocy.
Richard
“The models didn’t have the skill we thought they had” sounds ace.
But seems already covered by GIGO.
One study at one location does not make the sea level higher 5500 years ago all around the world.
So thank goodness there are other metrics in the right direction… really, right direction? Wow. How about simply reporting the truth? Is that so dangerous an idea? And how do models have “skills” ? Looking more like “any data in – hockey stick out” regardless of actual observations, I can smell fraud.
Does this mean that climate science is unsettled?
Eugene WR Gallun says:
Insult to birds Eugene. Are you not keeping up with the research?
http://tinyurl.com/n5wqy4y
They are as smart as children which is more than I can say for the climate Scientists (at least the one ones in the mythical consensus)
The computer models in and of themselves, do not have skill. The ones who coded the programming for the models are the human beings who have skill or not.
With time flat-lining and/or declining temperatures I think the lukewarmer sites will lose more and more to those sites that are starting to take a harder stance against AGW by showing with concrete examples the temperature frauds ect. In the end the “denying” sites will probably win since its beginning to look like they were correct after all LOL
This fits the nature of an informal fallacy; see –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
Don’t be fooled by the name – this is not about shooting.
Imagine when the aliens do come and talk to our leaders:
So you left many billions of your own species, the vast majority, to suffer miserable shorter lives because of energy poverty that you would not inflict onto yourselves, because you could not be motivated to build better and stronger buildings that would consistently withstand even your then-current weather extremes, nor would you stop constructing where those and other extremes could and would often destroy even strong buildings.
Which arose from doubting your relatively advanced civilization could survive mildly warmer global temperatures.
Why should we accept you as an intelligent species?
The Cult: So what is your problem? Don’t you understand that questioning the changing dogma of our Cult does not change our beliefs.
The obvious one to use as a measure of global warming is CO2.