“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.
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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]
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Where is the source for Stephen Briggs’s statement? I don’t find it.
The link to the Guardian leads to a link to stories by the Guardian which link back to the Guardian story itself. My brief googling for Stephen Briggs and the European Space Agency likewise turn up nothing.
Keith Willshaw on June 14, 2014 at 8:19 am
Between 535 and 536 AD the onset of rapid cooling produced crop failures, widespread famine and social collapse.
In 1348 we saw a combination of crop failures from cooling, disease and the Great Storms
kill around 50% of the population.
Between 1690 and 1707 a combination of cooling and terrible storms produced widespread famine in Northern Europe, around 20% of the population of Scotland starved to death.
This is the de-industrialised lifestyle to which the CAGW greens want us to return.
Bill Illis says: June 14, 2014 at 7:49 am
Interesting comment in the article (double-checked through other sources) that humans produce about 0.5 X 10^21 joules of energy each year. Didn’t realize it was this high. It is 10% of the amount of energy accumulating on Earth which is 0.5 X 10^22 joules/year.
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Sound a bit high to me.
Leif did this calculation a couple of years ago. I cannot remember the result in joules, but I do remember him saying that man’s energy output is the same as we receive from the full Moon on a cloudless night. In other words, not a lot.
I will try to find Leif’s posting.
Ralph
Pamela Gray says:
June 14, 2014 at 9:57 am
Was this satirical Pamela? Apologies if so. We have had such a system for several years now; it is called Argo.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/02/argo-temperature-and-ohc/
They seem pathologically unable to utter the most obvious statement regarding the now hopelessly compromised AGW theory: “folks, we were wrong.”
Bill Illis, John Slayton, ralfellis
My figure for global energy use is about 150 petawatthours per year, so to say that humans produce about 0.5 X 10^21 joules of energy each year is about right. But this is equivalent to an energy input of only 0.03 Watt per sq. metre of the Earth’s surface. Compared to the Sun’s energy input, 342 watts per square metre (at Top of Atmosphere), human produced ‘waste heat’ is negligible.
If the climate models that forecast surface temperatures have failed, how are the models that forecast sea level rise doing? Are they doing any better when compared to actual measurements? Does anyone have a chart showing how they compare? I have a hard time believing the models do any better with sea level rise than they do with surface temperatures.
Kemosabe? 😉
I’ve seen this type of behavior before in professional modellers. They fall in love with their model, and when the data do not support the model’s predictions, they try to figure out what’s wrong with the real world.
“The data do not support our model. Therefore, we need better data.”
“The new measure of global warming is to be sea level rise – presumably because it is still moving in the right direction”
Sure, albeit at a 30% slower rate in the past decade than the previous one. Well done, you’ve just found a new way to look desperate and clueless. They failed to model natural variability in surface temps, so what the hell makes them think they can effectively model natural variability in sea level rise?
The pig just got a new shade of lipstick.
Ordinarily we think of “proven false” as requiring nearly a decade to get the other side to run out of epicycles and escuses. So no warmist would concede that warmism could be proven false overnight—so he can’t envisage such a scenario. But if the theory below were to become generally accepted within a year, that would do. So the warmist should be asked how he would feel if Robitaille’s paper were proven true. (It could, after all, be tested experimentally.) I think that is a possible way to get him to see his underlying emotionalism.
Ouch. Trouble is rate of sea level rise is in fact decelerating.
Acceleration term, as observed by satellites for more than 21 years is -0.42 m/cy². If it goes on like this, sea level will stop rising well before the end of this century and will be only some 6 cm higher by 2100 than it is now. Furthermore, by 2200 it is projected to drop a foot below current level.
I can see why they are junking temperature and moving over to sea level:
From the European Space Agency website – the flat trend of temperature:
http://www.esa-sst-cci.org/sites/default/files/images/wcrp_ts_1.png
versus the nicely rising sea level:
http://www.esa-sealevel-cci.org/sites/default/files/images/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png
As Co2 rise and sea level rise coincide they must be right!! 🙂
ARGO has a lot of problems with QC related to the subset of ARGO floats that can dive well past the mixed layer into the deep ocean. The anomaly data is still a long ways away because they are still at the calibration stage. Let alone trying to water proof the damn things under such high pressure environments. In summary, the ARGO data shows no such thing regarding the bottom waters. The sampling below 2000 meters is still in research development. Use your “find” button to read all about deep data problems with ARGO.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDEQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.argo.ucsd.edu%2FDM14report.pdf&ei=ppWcU8GoHYaxyASNyYGIDA&usg=AFQjCNG4OuO0sZbYmwvlE0qLKrR4gKwVCw&sig2=Yp68PrphyYZfkJZXnDqJNg&bvm=bv.68911936,d.aWw
Per Bill Illis’s great comment at 7:49 am ( I wondered the same thing). But another thing I have wondered about and still don’t know if it is true – but I have read that insects release more CO2 than humans and all their various activities. Of course this is outside the scope of the IPCC mandate. 😏
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Do_humans_or_insects_produce_more_carbon_dioxide?#slide=1
Wish I knew of a better source. perhaps this is not correct.
JIMBO?
Bill Illis – Links on human heat output? Curious about it, have wondered about all the biological/geological heat and CO2 sources compared to humans. Be nice to find a site that tried to categorize these, but so many variables. Probably like try to assemble a GCM.
I have just read the paper excerpt from the link above and here:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/new-paper-questions-basic-physics.html
Where Robitaille describes a game changer: black body theory does not apply to climate theory as currently stated!
This throws into doubt the applicability of Kirchhoff, Boltzmann and Planck to this field.
A game changer worthy of intense study….
Steve W. says:
June 14, 2014 at 10:02 am
I remember at the time walking in the dry cave and realizing that it was obviously carved out by the sea, and that the sea level is lower now. It was a strange feeling to realize that the sea level we take for granted has varied quite a bit.
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We drive by evidence of higher sea levels OR land that has risen every day, we just don’t recognize them.
Salt Lake City (and a lot of souther Utah) is a great place to observe this. Look above Salt Lake to the east and you will see at least two old beaches high up on the mountains. However, Salt Lake has gone up and down from sea level to its present elevation so it is hard to say whether the oceans were higher or the land was lower. All relative. The area is now high plains and mountains but once it was below sea level. http://geology.utah.gov/utahgeo/geo/geohistory.htm
I suspect the agenda of the “Scientists” has very little to do with crisis of a metric to measure “Global Warming” (read Anthropogenic GW as opposed to Climate variability) but rather represents a crisis of continued funding. If those who owe there livelihood to AGW alarmism were to have an alternate funding source they would quit the AGW cult. In fact a few of them might even go on to produce useful scientific information in their lifetime. IMHO
Best out of three . .
Oh.oh, how about best out of five?
I’d say too much rain in the Swiss mountains. (maybe amusing but not a sarcasm)
Here is the right direction.
@Pamela Gray June 14, 2014 at 11:46 am
Indeed. But they must have unacknowledged issues at shallower depths as well. Net radiation balance calculated from CERES data has a nice annual cycle, the one calculated from ARGO OHC has not. Which means precision of the latter one is much lower than claimed.
Unfortunately CERES still has a large systematic error, so, in spite of its wonderful precision its overall accuracy is still too low to tell us anything about the energy balance of the climate system.
Helped along by man as usual. Groundwater abstraction is about “one fourth of the current rate of sea level rise of 3.3 mm per year.”
Here is the paper’s abstract
It’s always good to look back at sea level rise since the deglaciation. It could still get worse and begin accelerating! Oh no.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/ipcc2007/fig68.jpg
Waste Heat:
“The waste heat generated by car engines, power plants, home furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning machinery plays an unappreciated role in influencing regional climates, new computer simulations suggest. By altering atmospheric circulation, human-made heat may raise temperatures by as much as 1 degree Celsius during winter in the northernmost parts of the world.”
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/waste-heat-responsible-for-most-of-northern-hemisphere-warming/