“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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Well… I guess it’s full steam ahead, on ocean acidification. After all, the largest buffered salt solution reservoir, in the known universe , has/maybe decreased in pH (0.1). The war on CO2 production (proxy for industrial might) will continue… forever. GK
You say.
Since the end of the Little Ice Age and the recommenced rise in sea level we adapted. We used concrete and move back as necessary. This is nothing new, there is no need for anything ‘special’. We just need to do what we have been doing. Sea level rise is not NEW to us, we adapted while our standards of living improved.
Why should they move north and northern? How many crops are there in the world? Now here is what you really need to remember. AGW says that global warming would be felt most as you head away from the equator and towards the poles. It also says the effect would be felt most in winter and at night. As you can see agriculture in the USA would benefit and not shrivel and die.
And how long was that piece of string?? That’s got that one out of the way, conveniently, now let US…..’ Say no more!
G. Karst, from what source to your get your pH change? Is this in relation to the entire volume of ocean or just the first 200 meters, which is a fraction of the entire volume.
JK says: “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.”
There are so many reasons why the SST data prior to 1970 is lousy, but only those who took them and have read the UEA.CRU HADCRUT explanation of how they were fiddled would appreciate them.
“sea surface temperature data is the worst indicator of global climate that can be used, describing it as “lousy”. ” As most of the ” Global ” data in HADCRUT prior to 1970 is fiddled SSTs, it goes to show all these so called scientists are talking extreme bovine excrement. They are just hilarious!
Even more funny “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. A better measure, he said, was to look at the average rise in sea levels. The oceans store the vast majority of the climate’s heat energy. Increases in this stored energy translate into sea level rises.” So for an average rise in sea level, there must be an average cooling, because the average temp of the oceans is given as 3.8deg. C, and water does not begin to expand by a rise in temp until it is 4 deg.C.
[fixed, thanks -mod]
Did anyone here think the moon was made of cheese? Apparently climate skepticism is the scientific equivalent of believing the moon to be made of cheese. So says the POTUS.
They are really going for it. The big lie, that is.
I note here that they’ve redefined what climate is and as a consequence what climate change is. It is also important they’ve centered on the deep ocean where detection of energy content variation can only be achieved with models. It also obsoletes all surface data and methods. This is going to be expensive.
Pamela Gray, please don’t ask me for citations regarding warmist propaganda. The MSM and SkS does quite enough of it. The whole idea of man caused CO2 induced ocean acidification is absurd. We can consider it infinitely buffered and I have no confidence in current measurements being representative… of anything. GK
hunter says “Skeptics are vindicated in this as well. Skeptics have said for many years that the record is not reliable and […etc…etc…]“. I regret to have to inform you, hunter, that you have missed the point. Check the article again : no mention of sceptics. The controls are tightly held and will not be relinquished no matter what. It doesn’t matter at all if the message changes, provided the orwellians remain in control of it. Regrettably a lot more remains to be done to prise their fingers from the steering wheel.
chris moffatt “surface temps are exactly the ‘warming’ […]“. Tropical Troposphere temps were the first ones, together with temperatures at the poles. Two of the three never materialised, so the focus moved swiftly onto surface temps plus the one complier, the Arctic. The strategy is actually very simple: with enough parameters in the models, any real world data can be matched post-facto, and if the world is divided into enough parts, there will always be at least one that is warming (or, for back-up if needed, droughting, flooding, storming, etc). The parts they were relying on – the Arctic and surface temps – have started diverging from script, and the deep ocean didn’t capture public imagination as well as hoped, so they are now quietly switching to new parts of the world. Just at the moment these are difficult to find, but it has reached the point where they can use imaginary ones and (they think) get away with it.
They could still be right! If the polar see-saw continues to operate as in the past, they will heave a sigh of relief that they don’t have to keep fake ideas going, and morph seamlessly into Antarctic warming. As I said, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Bottom line : Don’t just see who’s right. See who is controlling the message.
Eric: One report that sea level at one location was 2 m higher 5500 years ago doesn’t imply that GLOBAL sea level was 2 m higher then. The local sea level at almost all locations is rising from uplift or falling from subsidence. Unless there are several credible reports from geologically stable regions showing the sea level was 2 m higher 5500 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to promote this outlier.
Sea level during the Eemian was higher than today, but others say 4 m, not 6 m.
A little bit of ice melting, or a little bit of heat expansion….is nothing
..compared to the amount of sedimentation washing into the oceans
From every stream and river, every coast line…24 hours….7 days a week
Now that the models are falling apart the climate obsessed are dismissing the models so they can cling to the catastrophe.
Of course these clowns are grateful for the production of a “new metric”. To mimic a trend that works for their social construct. It keeps the green political classes employed. But I must say, if that “metric” is put under the skeptic microscope, there is little doubt it will be full if the usual confirmation biases. Let’s be having this metric!
Need a new name. Global high tiding? Global lapping? Global beach creeping?
I certainly agree that the SST is lousy
data.
But…but…CONSESUS!
nexus4684
Hi Eric. Unfortunately the Guardian article linked does not contain the two most damming paragraphs in your quotation above. …
No, they are my comments, the Guardian as I said is a green newspaper, and very rarely criticises anything related to global warming hype.
[note: Eric is correct, there was a formatting issue, since corrected -mod]
Most of the outrage generated by this article is due to the failure to close an italics tag. It’s been pointed out several times in comments, but not corrected. That’s pretty sloppy. It’s also sloppy proofreading, which would have taken maybe a minute to see before publishing.
Jeff Alberts
Most of the outrage generated by this article is due to the failure to close an italics tag. It’s been pointed out several times in comments, but not corrected. …
The format issue has just been corrected. I’m sorry that my personal comments have been misinterpreted as part of the article, that was not the intention. The Guardian as I said is a green newspaper, and the article I linked is sympathetic to the suggestion that scientists switch to sea level as the main climate metric.
The Guardian very rarely print any criticism of green narratives, the two exceptions I can think of are Monbiot’s pro-nuclear article http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima , and Monbiot’s call for CRU resignations http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/feb/02/climate-change-hacked-emails , a demand which he later reversed http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jul/07/russell-inquiry-i-was-wrong .
Switching yardsticks because the old one doesn’t fit the narrative is IMO still pretty outrageous.
Steve O said on June 14, 2014 at 1:46 pm:
Between the model and the spouse.
I have said thus before and I will say this again: climate modeling does not work, it never did, and it should be abandoned. It started with Hansen in 1988 when he showed his three models, A, B, and C, of climate forecasts. Model A was his “business as usual” case, meaning normal course of events. B and C were examples of how emission control would alter it. He worked it all out to the year 2019 and frightened many with his predictions. We have lived through most of the period he was forecasting then and find that his predictions are truly worthless. He used an IBM mainframe but with huge sums going his way they have all switched to supercomputers and their model codes are now a million words long.. You see their output in the CMIP5 duster graphs where each individual thread, dozens of them, comes from a separate supercomputer. You would think that using supercomputers and writing million word codes for them should get their predictions close to reality, but no such luck. They have had time to polish their act for 26 years since Hansen’s original presentation yet their present day output is no better than Hansen’s original work was. And in some cases it is much worse, like their attempt to deny the existence of the twenty-first century pause. There may be reasons why they just can’t hack it despite millions spent on their supercomputer collection but that is no excuse. One reason is their mistaken notion that carbon dioxide causes warming. Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT) proves that failure of the Arrhenius greenhouse theory is the cause of this pause in warming and NOAA records That Miskolczi used prove it. Hansen announced grandly in 1988 that the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide had been detected when that was entirely wrong. What he did was to use the non-greenhouse warming that took place between 1910 and 1940 as part of an imagined “hundred years of greenhouse warming” that supposedly proved the existence of the greenhouse effect. But he proved no such thing because his hundred years of greenhouse warming was not real. Nevertheless, he has been talking about it for the last 26 years. IPCC was founded in 1988 in the belief that he really did discover the greenhouse effect. As a result, all claims of anthropogenic global warming take this as a fact and assume that greenhouse warming caused it. If you consider that with thousands of climate scientists working with the greenhouse hypothesis no one has still come out with one solid experimental demonstration that the greenhouse effect exists you should become suspicious about this too. It so happens that Ferenc Miskolczi has produced proof that that the greenhouse effect actually does not even exist. Using NOAA radiosonde observations that go back to 1948 he studied the absorption of IR by the real atmosphere over time. And found that absorption remained constant for 61 years while at the same time carbon dioxide increased by 21.6 percent. This is an exact parallel to the pause we have had for the last 17 years, for in both cases carbon dioxide increase does not cause any temperature increase. The models are totally incompetent to handle this, just one more reason to dump them.
JK says: “To be precise Stephen Briggs described sea surface temperature as a lousy ‘indicator of global climate’.”
VERY good point. I too was mislead by this the first time I read it. Thanks.
So the lousy models make a lousy job of predicting a lousy indicator of climate.
Well, crap! I suppose we’ll need to find something else to worry about then.
Well we know the data is lousy. But it is the ancient data; about pre-1980, of supposed ocean Temperatures (lower tropo over the ocean) that was lousy.
That was because pre ocean buoys, circa 1980, atmospheric temperatures over the ocean were evidently believed to be the same as the actual ocean water temperatures; specially back in the 1850s. So they measured the temperature in a bucket of water from some unknown depth, evaporating on a windy deck, and assumed that was the air temperature. Later , (early 1900s) they switched to measuring the water temperature from some variable depth, depending on ship loading, in the cooling water intake for often coal burning steamers, and often in the hot boiler room, rather than the cold windy deck.
About Jan 2001, John Christy (Prof) et al reported on direct simultaneous near surface (-1 meter) water temperature, and near surface (+3 meters) air temperatures, and found they are not the same . FOR THAT 20 YEARS (roughly), the air temperature change (for those buoys) was something like 60% of the water temperature change . If I have this all scrambled, then read it yourself. I believe it was Jan 2001 GRL.
BUT !! the big news, was that the two weren’t correlated. So you can’t correct earlier numbers from the water temperatures, so that ^0% or whatever discrepancy was ONLY for that 20 odd years of observations. It is not a universal global correction factor.
SO I always assume than all pre 1980 “global temperature” records, are total junk..
I’m sure PJC never said that. that is my interpretation of the Geo-Physical Research Letters paper from Jan 2001; or thereabouts.
Giggle it yourself.
If no one else says it then I will.
THE MODELS HAVE FAILED!
We have been saying that for many years and even some Warmists now agree. They are crap, not fit for their purpose, a disgrace to Climastrology. Or maybe they were fit for ‘the purpose’, 😉 if you know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Long live the astrology models!
When are we going to shut down the IPCC??? These folks need to get back to science work and leave this mumbo jumbo well alone.