“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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Tilt, tilt, tilt. The above is addressed to Matt , NOT Paul.
Read everything before doing anything.
Sorry Paul.
“”””””……David L. says:
June 14, 2014 at 4:41 pm
Ronald DeWitt on 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…….””””””
I bet that the new breeds of corn, that have been developed at great commercial expense, have also contributed to corn yields continuing to increase.
Don’t blame increasing world food availability, on the weather.
I have been waiting for the warmest crowd to abandon their temperature records. Thanks to places like WUWT it has become difficult for them to manipulate the past down and the present up. They are still doing it to a degree, but the cooling trend is wiping out their fudges to a pause.
The increased scrutiny has over the past few years, has them by the short and curlies. Thus they now grasp at straws. The British Admiralty embarked on the mapping of the oceans and the marking of low tide dry rocks world wide a long time ago. They are still there imprinted and still dry at low tide. Many along the coast of my home land Australia, if the oceans have risen over the last couple of centuries, it has been by very little. Good luck to them trying to prove global warming by inundation, a fools errand.
“””””…..sunshinehours1 says:
June 14, 2014 at 4:35 pm
MikeB: “Compared to the Sun’s energy input, 342 watts per square metre (at Top of Atmosphere), human produced ‘waste heat’ is negligible.”……”””””
The suns rate of energy input (to earth) is 1366 W / m^2., not 342.
And the units of energy are Joules, not Watts.
The truth is, sea level as a global calorimeter is probably the best thing we have for integrating the net of all the fluxes in the climate system. The problem is that with a heat capacity that exceeds the atmosphere and surface by orders of magnitude, it tells us next to nothing about the conditions that we live in, other than sea level itself. If the deep ocean warms by 0.005°C/year and continues to rise at 2-3mm/year, that would balance the books for anthropogenic warming, without any “unprecedented” floods, droughts, superstorms, heat waves, polar vortices, or anything other than climate and weather as usual.
>Tilt, tilt, tilt. The above is addressed to Matt , NOT Paul.
Yes you were right, Furthermore, TCE of seawater increases with pressure as well.
As long as you’ve got the hair’s “bulb” as well as the hair. The hair alone is insufficient.
So ….. the models are wrong and the data is worthless. Amazing …. proposals for trillions of dollars of energy reconfiguration based on a scientific theory that once again is exactly that …. a bloody theory – with no observational support and no models worth a damn.
And this new proposal : base theoretical validation on observations that are at best a proxy, have every limited historical data, comes from an extremely chaotic and complex system the understanding of which is in its infancy and where the actual proxy data they now state as THE evidence required, is showing the WRONG trend to be able to support the theory, ie, MSL rise has been decelerating over the last 15 years when it should have been accelerating (if all this hear is supposed to have been going tinto the ocean
The whole MMGW idea is a complete house of bloody cards.
Apparently they also missed, that the rate of sea level rise is slowing. Just read recently the rate of sea level rise is down 30%.
Looks like they’ll be scraping the barrel for new excuses to justify the carbon taxes, shutting down of industry and offshoring of jobs.
“..and when they discover they got sea levels wrong
It will be pikas, cherry blossoms, and frog farts……..”
what you can not see or touch must be the…
The holy CAGW ghost?
Great find, very significant admission. But it doesn’t seem that sea levels were 2 meters higher during the Holocene, 5500 years ago, it seems they were slightly lower than today. See graph in this article on Judith Curry’s web site:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-sea-levels-part-1-from-the-holocene-to-romans/
I’ve seen this same graph, or one very similar to it, many other times.
Yes, sea level was about 7 meters higher during the Eemian.
They make it up as they go along.
Is it wrong to laugh at these wan*ers?
We have lots of data showing that temperature increases at approximately 25 degrees C per 1000m as you descend into the depths of the earths crut (deep gold and diamond mines etc).
The deep ocean is just a few degrees C implying that there may be a massive transfer of energy from the ocean floor to the adjacent sea water.
I have not found any documentation on the ocean bed / water energy transfer.
*SR*
These are our models and if you don’t like them we have others!
Steve Keohane says:
June 14, 2014 at 9:07 am
“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.
================
hmm next big bullshit campaign
its not acid oceans but they might get too Salty?
as the evaporated water turns into snow and ice on land
george e. smith says:
June 14, 2014 at 8:16 pm
“””””…..sunshinehours1 says:
June 14, 2014 at 4:35 pm
MikeB: “Compared to the Sun’s energy input, 342 watts per square metre (at Top of Atmosphere), human produced ‘waste heat’ is negligible.”……”””””
The suns rate of energy input (to earth) is 1366 W / m^2., not 342.
And the units of energy are Joules, not Watts.
====
Hint 342 * 4 = 1368 😉
MikeB’s figure correctly gives the average of the solar flux over entire Earth’s surface. Compare surface of sphere ( 4 pi r^2 ) to the circular cross-section intercepting solar rad. ( pi.r^2 ) at 1366 W / m^2
Joules and Watts are surnames, the scientific units are joule and watt, neither capitalised nor pluralised. The “rate of energy input” would be W not W / m^2, the latter being a unit of flux. If you’re going be pendantic, you need to get it right. 😉
“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.”
“Trustworthy” meaning having been suitably homogenised, bais-adjusted etc. to give the required answers, at which point the only the end result “can be accessed by all.” Open access and transparency has never been the hallmark of access to primary data neither at european agencies nor from national meteo services within european countries.
The UK Met. Office is still part of the Ministry of Defence and if climate data it not marked “top secret” it may as well be if you want to actually see it.
Daily climate data in UK is controlled by local met offices that usually want a prohibitive amount of money to release daily data. Per Phil Jones in climategate emails , they’re “hiding behind” intellectual property arguments to avoid releasing data.
Swiss meteo data ( geographic, not political “europe” ) don’t even have a link to download _anything_. Austrian met. office demand a large sum plus a “non disclosure ” agreement.
Open and transparent ? Don’t make be laugh.
Jeff L says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:29 pm
Sea level change ??? They think they can accurately separate out tectonic , eustatic, variable ice melt & other hydrologic cycle variations , etc from thermal expansion ???
Good luck with that.
Hard to see where it will be any more accurate than surface temps
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No, but they think that gives them enough “correction factors” to get the result to be whatever they want it to be, no matter what.
This will then “trusted data” , the ONLY dataset that will acceptable for assessing “global warming”.
So we have a new saying?
“When the data fits – use it”
Or perhaps the reverse of the old saying..
“When the cap doesn’t fit – find a new head”
RobertInAz says:
June 14, 2014 at 9:18 am
One study at one location does not make the sea level higher 5500 years ago all around the world.
True that. There is ample evidence that sea levels can be many feet higher in one location (Bay of Fundy) than generally.
But the warmists claim that ARGO shows the opposite of what you postulate (that the bottom waters have warmed more than the upper 700 meters).
Given that ARGO only dives to 700 meters that is very convenient.
Greg, a watt is one joule per second and watts per square metre is simply saying how much energy each square metre receives in one second. Scientifically literate people recognise that all these terms are referring to an energy input; sorry if that excludes you.
For SI unit values more than 1 or less than -1 the plural of the unit is used and a singular unit is used for values between 1 and -1. See the link to the National Physics Laboratory if you doubt this http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/measurement-units/si-conventions/
“Wikipedia is also good on this “The plural forms of units follow the grammar of the language concerned: in English, the normal rules of English grammar are used, e.g. ‘henries’ is the plural of ‘henry’”
You could have looked these things up yourself before making afool of yourself but then you would be in danger of learning something.
By the way, the joule is named after someone called Joule, not Joules and the watt is named after someone called Watt, not Watts.
George e smith
All SI unit names are lower-case, so it is wrong to say Watts and Joules. You are even behind Greg on this one so you can learn from him.
TAG says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:57 am
“…..The problem is that even a little warming can cause significant economic problems…….”
You mean, like the Roman period, the Medieval Warm Period and the late 20th century?
Chris