“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]
Gamecock says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:30 am
“The Models didn’t have the skill we thought they had…”
What’s this “we” stuff?
The “we” could include anyone having anything to do with models.
I wasn’t sure who Peter Jan van Leeuwen was at first, because it’s not a name I’ve ran across previously in my investigations.
Having done some investigation just now, I think it is fair to say that he implicates everyone involved in climate predictions using global temperature predictions.
The IPCC TP III paper writes,”The IPCC considers two simple indices of climate change, global mean temperature and sea level rise. The change in global mean temperature is the main factor determining the rise in sea level; it is also a useful proxy for overall climate change.”
Leeuwen must have forgot this.
Soon after the release of the IPCC, Leeuwen co-authored, “When can we expect extremely high surface temperatures?”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL034071/full#grl24645-fig-0003
You will find everything I’m saying in the article I described above.
Everyone is implicated by his admission, Hansen, Jones, Mann, right on down the line.
How can Leeuwen even suggest that only sea level rise can properly predict climate change, when seal level rise is dependant on global temperature.
If he doesn’t retract this comment, I imagine anyone having anything in association with Leeuwen, will soon be distancing themselves from him.
Have they told the IPCC that they should now abandon metrics based on surface warming? A lot of work has gone into them there reports dontcha know.
After many years of telling us what was important (surface warming), they now tell us it’s not important. I wonder what they would say if there was no pause? 😉
Hi Eric. Unfortunately the Guardian article linked does not contain the two most damming paragraphs in your quotation above. Specifically:
“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.”
Was the story changed after you posted this story in which these two most damming paragraphs were removed? Do you perhaps have a screenshot or otherwise a copy of the Guardian story containing these paragraphs?
Kindest regards,
DFact
Very simple….just like thinking scientists the sea surface measurement “are not helpful”
We must remember these people and never, never consider them scientists again. Useful tools of their political bosses is more spot on.
Just a short document on correct terminology regarding “deep ocean”.
An internet search reveals that http://www.artinaid.com/2013/04/the-ocean-layers/
The ocean is divided by depth into five main layers:
◦the “hadalpelagic zone” between 11,000 meters (36,000 feet) and 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) deep,
◦the “abyssal” between 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) and 4,000 meters (15,000 feet) deep,
◦the “bathyal” between 4,000 meters (15,000 feet) and 1,000 meters (3,000 feet) deep
◦the “midwater” between 1,000 meters (3,000 feet) and 200 meters (700 feet) deep
◦the “epipelagic” (from 700 feet to the surface) where 90% of the living from the sea.
Over 90% of the volume of the ocean is below the bathyal layer and the temperature there is constant due to the ocean volume + movement + lack of light + salinity + “heaviness” + pressure physics involved. The midwater layer is where the thermocline “slab” meanders depending on a number of variables. The thickness of the slab can vary dramatically, especially on the top. It is that slab that separates the mixing layer from the deeper temperature stable areas. It can also vary in terms of its temperature and pressure gradient.
From these basic understandings, it is a stretch to say that energy is in the deep oceans defined by being below 700 meters. Why? Because natural mixing from the epipelagic layer and movement of the bottom part of the thermocline slab to the deeper pressure levels is likely to happen below 700 meters under normal circumstances. This means that any data collected below 700 meters that demonstrates warming could easily be contaminated with natural trends.
To say that anthropogenic warming is being stored in the deep ocean to me means that it should be measured below the midwater level, IE below 1000 meters. That means deep, to me. Anything less than that is in the midwater to the surface ocean level, not the deep ocean level.
To be able to proceed from here I need to know how it is possible for an “Atmospheric Gas” (AG) that is incapable of warming other atmospheric gases, or any solid surfaces, can possibly warm the bottom of the oceans.
Here am I, sitting around, thinking that “Hot Air Rises”
Ok, SST is lousy –
ARGO initially showed a decrease which of course was intolerable so they adjusted it to show an increase and it’s now more wrong than ever.
http://virakkraft.com/S-trop-Indian-OHC-SOI.png
http://virakkraft.com/Trop-OHC-SOI.png
and sea level do not change more now than 80 years ago
http://virakkraft.com/PSMSL-from-KNMI.png
But wait – antarctica ice is collapsing – puh – or was that next century?
MikeB, there is only a small subset of ARGO divers that go to the deeper layers. It is a very small set and they are currently not quality controlled to the extent that the very short time wise amount of data is not publishable (or at least it seems that is the case based on the last 2013 ARGO meeting document).
Keith Wilshaw wrote:
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TAG Said
> If sea level was two metres ( 6 1/2 ft) higher 5500 years ago then it could be two metres
> higher in the foreseeable future.
Indeed but recall that sea level was around 240 ft LOWER at the end of the last glacial period 12,000 years ago. Of course that was because much of Northern Europe, Asia and North America was under a mile or so of ice,
> The problem with global warming isn’t teh catastrophes and moral failure claimed
> by AGW zealots. The problem is that even a little warming can cause significant
> economic problems
History indicates that the onset of cold periods is more disruptive. The end of the Roman and Mediaeval warm periods produced catastrophic upheavals and famines as did the lttle ice age of the 17th century. The most extreme climate catastrophes also occurred around these periods.
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From what I can see, we are agreeing with each other at least on the potentially serious effects of even relatively slight changes in climate. So the effects of CO2 induced warming is something to be concerned about. One does not have to buy into the hysterical predictions of AGW zealots to understand that it is only responsible to pursue the knowledge that will allow society to prepare for any consequences. That is why it is so important to have valid and not politicized climate science. That is why we need to make sure than any climate predictions are being made by scientists and not activists or careerists working as scientists.
Oh dear, another failed narrative.
I’m waiting for… “Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are driving a new Ice Age”.
At least their climate predictions will likely prove out even if the causation is mis-characterized.
This seems to be one of those “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” moments.
This new goal post move is going to be a big problem for warmunists.
Sea levels were rising before 1960, when even the IPCC said CO2 induced global warming was indistinguishable from natural variation, since we are still recovering from the LIA (except in Mann’s mind). Even more of a problem, SLR has recently been slowing rather than accelerating as measured by satellite altimetry. Something that several completely asinine papers have tried to explain away after admitting the slowing observation. These are shredded in an essay for my next book in process. Bottom lines, it did not rain as much in 2010-2011 in Australia as some papers required (off by half), and GRACE did not verify terrestrial water retention (off by 75%). In the newest paper, fancy statistical corrections to correct SLR for more La Nina rainfall in the Amazon and Congo ignored two basic problems: first there haven’t been more La Ninas, second, the Amazon and Congo river basins where all this extra rainfall was supposedly stored over 6 years (slowing observed SLR) actually cannot store any extra water at all over even one season. They are both annually saturated. The authors really should have visited. Then they would have realized their statistical paper was ‘all wet’. Proves only that CAGW climatologists desperate to explain slowing SLR know nothing of hydrology (and have never been to the Amazon or the Congo), that peer review fails big time, and that the pause makes warmunists increasingly desperate. Even silly looking.
Anyone who thought the global temperature anomaly was suspect should contemplate the design spec for the newest SLR altimetry satellite, Jason 2. The altimetric sea level spec for any specific location is an RMS error of 3.5cm (darned those waves, clouds, and other stuff); the system drift spec is 1mm/yr. And present SLR is supposed to be 2.4mm/yr down from 3.1. Inside a location specific RMS 3.5CM?!? Exactimundo-NOT.
The Jason 2 design spec is available at OSTM/Jason-2 Products Handbook, JPL ref. OSTM-29-1237 (1/20/2009). Please refer to Section 2.3.1, Accuracy of Sea Level Measurement.
Do you have any evidence for claiming that a “little warming” can cause “SIGNIFICANT” economic problems?
The world has been warming since the end of the Litttle Ice Age and standards of living around the world are higher today than in 1850 or 1920 or 1950 or 1975 etc.
Here is the difference between warm and cold. First the warm.
Now the cold. Below are some of the effects of the Little Ice Age on humanity from the literature. In short we had crop failures, hunger, mass migration, epidemics, great storms in the North Atlantic, Europe wide witch hunts, endemic Malaria in England & part of the Arctic Circle, higher wildfire frequency in circumboreal forests, strong droughts in central Africa (1400–1750), social unrest in China, dead Central American coral reef, century-scale droughts in East Africa, large increases in flood magnitude (upper Mississippi tributaries), environmental and economic deterioration in Norway, decline in average height of Northern European men, climate became drier on the Yucatan Peninsula, sudden and catastrophic end of the Norse Western Settlement in Greenland, River Thames freeze-overs, agro-ecological, socioeconomic, and demographic catastrophes, leading to the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century.
So the thermometers were GOOD for the purpose until the pause? Should we pay anymore attention to the IPCC’s surface temperature projections? Will they abandon the ’cause’ IF the rate off sea level rise fails to accelerate? (which it has so far failed to do – see above.)
The dog ate my thermal expansion.
Bill Illis says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:49 am
Humans are so funny. We always like to think that we’re far more powerful than we are. The world is a huge place, and the amounts of energy flowing through the climate system are gigantic.
The sun supplies 340 W/m2 to the earth at top-of-atmosphere, which is about 5.5E+24 joules/year. This is no less than 10,000 times the human-produced energy. Of this, about 240 W/m2 actually makes it into the system, with the rest reflected into space.
This means that the human-generated component of the total available energy in the system, all of our electricity and all of our burning of fossil fuels and all of our energy use in every form, it all adds up to a pathetic 1 / 7500 of the total, or about 0.01% of the global energy budget.
You’re comparing it to the ocean storage, which is only a minuscule part of the whole. Here’s a graphic showing the flows to scale:
Regards,
w.
Jimbo writes:
Do you have any evidence for claiming that a “little warming” can cause “SIGNIFICANT” economic problems?
Well we now have an industrial civilization with major cities located at the sea coasts. Sea level rise could necessitate major investments in widespread areas. Increased temperatures in North America compel agriculture to move north and northern regions with the results of the last glaciation are not as fertile as land to the south. it is difficult to grow crops in the rocky ground of northern Ontario. Society must be aware of the consequences and only sound non-political science can provide that.
Lousy scientists, lousy models, lousy AGW hypothesis,…
Climatology has the resources to do much better. Show the door to these cretins and reclaim your field.
TAG says:
June 14, 2014 at 1:25 pm
Jimbo writes:
TAG says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:57 am
If sea level was two metres ( 6 1/2 ft) higher 5500 years ago then it could be two metres higher in the foreseeable future. The problem with global warming isn’t teh catastrophes and moral failure claimed by AGW zealots. The problem is that even a little warming can cause significant economic problems
Do you have any evidence for claiming that a “little warming” can cause “SIGNIFICANT” economic problems?
Well we now have an industrial civilization with major cities located at the sea coasts. Sea level rise could necessitate major investments in widespread areas. Increased temperatures in North America compel agriculture to move north and northern regions with the results of the last glaciation are not as fertile as land to the south. it is difficult to grow crops in the rocky ground of northern Ontario. Society must be aware of the consequences and only sound non-political science can provide that.
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You are talking about the consequences of bad choices not the consequences of a warmer climate on human health. Coles notes…..Cold climate people die as a consequence of the cold…..Warmer Climate people thrive as a consequence of the warmth. Of course extreme warmth would have dire consequences but a 2’C increase (if it came to be) is not extreme IMHO but my opinion is worth what you pay for it.
TAG, the weather and climate responds with some pretty well known patterns that are themselves noisy with variants within themselves when responding to for example a variable having to do with things that change solar insolation or things that increase or decrease temperature variations or pressure systems between latitude bands. It has within itself these natural highly variable things that trigger natural highly variable weather and climate responses. These form the basis for short (IE in a couple days) and long range (IE out to a month or two) weather pattern predictions. They get them pretty close inside the ballpark with a short lead time locally and with a longer lead time regionally.
But can what makes up our climate have both high sensitivity and low sensitivity? For example, its response to a small volcano blow is not detectable in global weather averages used to create temperature trends. It has to be a big one. So it has low sensitivity, globally, to an atmospheric variable change in aerosols. How can it then have high sensitivity to a different and far less powerful variable, such as the amount of additional atmospheric CO2 directly related to humans? Explain that paradox please.
What does he mean with “we”?
Let’s add a new Ice Age to the growing list of proven consequences of Global Warming, as proposed by The Only Real Global Patriots.
Sometimes you have to choose between the theory and the data.
As far as the rising ocean levels, there is another major factor that is not being discussed as a cause. Lets talk about tectonic plate movements of the earth. Is the sea level rising or is the land sinking? Is the bottom of the oceans rising? To say that melted ice is the whole cause of rising oceans is too narrow of a hypothesis.
The issue is not about rising sea levels – they have been rising since the last deglaciation. It’s about whether there has been an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise. I have seen no evidence there has been; see my references above to show DEceleration in the rate.
The issue of pause or no pause is merely a diversion in the face of noisy data and short term chaos, whereas granting sea level proper authority in the climate debate represents a perfect opportunity for skeptics to point to the official peer reviewed update of sea level on the ground in the form of the world average of tide gauges and the blunt fact that despite virtual sea level constructions being illegally labelled as “sea level,” the real McCoy shows a pencil straight trend right through our high emissions era, meaning it shows zero enhanced warming trend as the oceans act as a liquid expansion thermometer, thus falsifying climate alarm:
http://postimg.org/image/uszt3eei5/
Sea level rise isn’t expected to itself pause since it only acts as a thermometer above and beyond normal ice melting at the frigid poles between ice ages, though even that assumption is confounded by growing sea ice in Antarctica.