But, we already knew that from experience. However, a lot of models still treat climate as a mostly or near linear process, and that’s why they aren’t performing particularly well at even predicting the present.
(via the Hockeyschtick) A paper published July in Science says “the climate system can be highly nonlinear, meaning that small changes in one part can lead to much larger changes elsewhere.”
“Some proposed mechanisms for transmission of major climate change events between the North Pacific and North Atlantic predict opposing patterns of variations; others suggest synchronization. Resolving this conflict has implications for regulation of poleward heat transport and global climate change.”
“When the climates of the more local high-latitude Pacific and Atlantic sectors varied in parallel, large, abrupt climate fluctuations occurred on a more global scale.”
One of many examples would be the interactions of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [PDO] and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation [AMO], which are sometimes aligned in the same positive phase to produce abrupt global warming, sometimes aligned in the same negative phase to produce abrupt global cooling, and sometimes in opposite phases which “cancel” their net global effect.
Systems which are “highly nonlinear” and chaotic are extremely difficult to impossible to predict or model. The projections of current climate models show that the models really boil down to just a simplistic 1:1 linear function of CO2 levels:
Needless to say, modeling the “highly nonlinear” and chaotic global climate system using a linear function of a single independent variable – CO2 – is nonsense and an essentially worthless exercise. Damaging the entire global economy and basing policy decisions upon such models is pure insanity.
From the AAAS Journal: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/444.short
Science 25 July 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6195 pp. 444-448 DOI: 10.1126/science.1252000
Abstract:
Some proposed mechanisms for transmission of major climate change events between the North Pacific and North Atlantic predict opposing patterns of variations; others suggest synchronization. Resolving this conflict has implications for regulation of poleward heat transport and global climate change. New multidecadal-resolution foraminiferal oxygen isotope records from the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) reveal sudden shifts between intervals of synchroneity and asynchroneity with the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) δ18O record over the past 18,000 years. Synchronization of these regions occurred 15,500 to 11,000 years ago, just prior to and throughout the most abrupt climate transitions of the last 20,000 years, suggesting that dynamic coupling of North Pacific and North Atlantic climates may lead to critical transitions in Earth’s climate system.
Editor’s Summary:
Climates conspire together to make big changes
The regional climates of the North Pacific and North Atlantic fluttered between synchrony and asynchrony during the last deglaciation, with correspondingly more and less intense effects on the rest of the world, researchers have found. The climate system can be highly nonlinear, meaning that small changes in one part can lead to much larger changes elsewhere. This type of behavior is especially evident during transitions from glacial to interglacial conditions, when climate is affected by a wide variety of time-varying influences and is relatively unstable. Praetorius and Mix present a record of North Pacific climate over the past 18,000 years. When the climates of the more local high-latitude Pacific and Atlantic sectors varied in parallel, large, abrupt climate fluctuations occurred on a more global scale.
“But, we already knew that from experience. However, a lot of models still treat climate as a mostly or near linear process, and that’s why they aren’t performing particularly well at even predicting the present.”
Care needs to be taken not confound two different things. Some individual climate phenomena are highly non-linear ( like tropical storms which have strong internal positive feedbacks ) . That does not prevent the cumulative regional effect of TS on SST being a negative , probably roughly linear feedback.
IMO that is not the principal reason why computer models are near useless at present.
Non-linear. So the theory that just adding CO₂ increases global temps may not be correct after all. Who knew?
The main reason models are not working is that the whole venture was set out to ‘prove’ a foregone conclusion and data have been ‘corrected’ to fall into line with that worldview.
None of this has anything to do with science and has wasted most of the effort and resources of the last 30 years.
Volcanic effects have been grossly mis-calculated and misinterpreted. Beyond the initial surface cooling that lasts just a few years, there is an opposite and more durable effect. This is most clearly seen in the stratosphere, where there is a lot less climate “noise”:
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=902
Stratosphere cools after major eruptions and stays cooler. Follow links in the text for how this relates to surface warming.
North Atlantic indices also display so called ‘non-stationary’ correlation, ie the ‘time domain’ is stretched and squeezed by number of years (mind boggles!). When that is taken into account then the related parameters ( here atmospheric pressure and SST ) can be brought into a linear (time domain) correlation.
The initial cooling of volcanic forcing as estimated from atmospheric optical density measurements has been ‘adjusted’ to fit model output:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=884
The original Lacis et al paper ( on which Hansen was a co-author ) did an estimation based on atmospheric physics and observational data most from El Chichon eruption. They scaled AOD by 33 W/m2
A few years later the same team changed this to 21 W/m2 in order to better agree with model output
The correct scientific approach would have been to reduce the sensitivity of the model to agree with the data.
This would avoid the excessive warming post 2000 which failed to materialise.
I really don’t think the major problems are to do with non linearity.
New study finds the Pope to be Catholic.
I would have thought this kind of paper with its conclusion would have come out several decades ago and every “climate 101” class would have referenced it. It is all so self evident I am befuddled. Maybe it will be the basis for a new generation of “excuse” papers for the pause. I am just a rookie having followed the issue closely for only 6 years or so, but the developments over that period certainly confirm a lot more of the skeptics view than the warmists view. This “non-linear” concept was about the first thing I learned from reading comments by skeptics.
Oops, posted a link to the TLS that is not publicly readable:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=902
“Stratosphere cools after major eruptions and stays cooler. Follow links in the text for how this relates to surface warming.”
So the paper says
“the climate system can be highly nonlinear, meaning that small changes in one part can lead to much larger changes elsewhere.”
Of course, they could also have written “the climate system can be highly nonlinear, meaning changes can be self-correcting” but for some reason they chose not to.
You mean systems with multiple variables, complex and interacting susbsystems with numerous oscillating and resonating elements and which can include both positive and negative feedbacks related to a parameter and rates of change of parameters might be NON LINEAR?????
OMG, my paradigm just shifted. Where’s my mommy?
In a way it’s quite disturbing that one still has to publish papers stating the obvious.
The HockeyShtick writes: “One of many examples would be the interactions of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [PDO] and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation [AMO]…”
If the use of the PDO is a referral to the PDO data available through the JISAO website, there is no mechanism through which the PDO (the spatial pattern of the sea surface temperature anomalies of the extratropical North Pacific) alters global surface temperatures since the PDO does not represent the surface temperatures of that region in the North Pacific. The PDO only represents the spatial pattern. For further info see:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/the-201415-el-nino-part-5-the-relationship-between-the-pdo-and-enso/
If the use of the PDO in the article is a reference to the multidecadal variations in the sea surface temperatures of the North Pacific, which do run in and out of phase with those of the North Atlantic…
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/multidecadal-variations-and-sea-surface-temperature-reconstructions/
…then the variations in the North Pacific do contribute to or suppress global warming, like the AMO. But the use of the PDO that way adds unnecessary confusion to those new to the topic.
Greg
Nonlinear does not just mean the relationship between parameters a and b is not a straight line. It is much more than that. At the heart of what it means for climate is this:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469%281963%29020%3C0130%3ADNF%3E2.0.CO%3B2
DNF 63 is in my view the starting point of meaningful climate science. It showed, by one of tbe very first and still probably the most important climate computer simulation, that a simple model of climate with just a handful of inputs, displaying nonlinear chaotic dynamics, as it evolved will fluctuate in a complex manner with no change to its external parameters .
Reflection on the significance of DNF63 by Lorenz will show how deeply problematic the term “forcing” is in climate science. It will reveal that for any climate change, the null hypothesis is that the climate has changed itself without the need of any external forcing.
” Assessing bias corrections in historical sea surface temperature using a climate model, Folland”
ftp://ftp.wmo.int/Documents/PublicWeb/amp/mmop/documents/JCOMM-TR/J-TR-13-Marine-Climatology/REV1/joc1171.pdf
“The tests are important because SST corrections considerably affect estimates of the magnitude of global warming since the late 19th century. ”
” Over Australia, the model may have reconstructed LSAT changes using bias-corrected GISST with greater accuracy than the observations before about 1910.”
So feeding ‘corrected’ SST into an atmospheric model does not agree with observations, but that “may” mean that the observations are wrong and the corrections and model have “greater accuracy”.
… or maybe not.
And this is what passes as “validation” of the bias corrections to SST. We are long way from worrying about non-linearities in the system. The whole game is being rigged to fit their preconceptions.
I thought the IPCC already stated in it’s many reports that climate was a complex, non-linear, chaotic system? Doesn’t it seem that this paper is redundant?
So, you type in at one end, “show a rise in temperature for added CO2!”, & out the business end you get, “temperature increase if more CO2 added!”, it must therefore be right!!! Wow, what great deductive reasoning.
phlogiston says:
July 25, 2014 at 3:34 am
New study finds the Pope to be Catholic.
Does the Pope know? Was this the result of a model?
Thanks phlogiston, it’s worth keeping in mind the way a deterministic but ‘chaotic’ system behaves. Lorentzian attractors may be a good explanation for the irregular flips between glacial and inter-glacial, as well as other smaller scale glitches like the Pacific climate shift around 1976.
Even something as trivial as “random walk” can produce time series that are very similar looking to some climate data.
However, there a certain things that can be seen to have a direct physical cause that it does not need chaos theory to explain.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=902
dccowboy says: “I thought the IPCC already stated in it’s many reports that climate was a complex, non-linear, chaotic system? Doesn’t it seem that this paper is redundant?”
They put that is thier 2001 report that climate was chaotic and could be predicted… and this did. They’ve gone a bit quiet on that aspect since.
Climate appears ‘nonlinear’ not because it is fundamentally nonlinear. The ‘observation’ that climate is nonlinear just proves our ignorance.
The paper simply conveys that scientists are not intelligent enough to predict climate changes but in a nice way.
http://www.debunkingrelativity.com
Volcanic activity seems to correlate with low solar activity:
http://www.iceagenow.com/Volcanic_activity_increasing_worldwide.htm
Why do I keep mentioning volcanoes?
Because ice ages correlate with huge increases in volcanic activity.
http://www.debate.org/photos/albums/1/2/1258/32577-1258-uvv5z-a.jpg
phlogiston says:
July 25, 2014 at 4:07 am
Habibullo Abdussamatov has identified 2014 as the first year cooling will be identifiable. Last year he was more tentative. This year he is definite. Visit this page
http://www.oarval.org/ClimateChangeBW.htm
And look for this image:
“Figure 1. Variations of both the TSI and solar activity in 1978-2013 and prognoses of these variations to cycles 24-27 until 2045. The arrow indicates the beginning of the new Little Ice Age epoch after the maximum of cycle 24.”
Volcanic activity also seems to correlate with solar activity in the latest interglacial:
http://www.debate.org/photos/albums/1/2/1258/32577-1258-uvv5z-a.jpg
“Before it is safe to attribute a global warming or a global cooling effect to any other factor (CO2 in particular) it is necessary to disentangle the simultaneous overlapping positive and negative effects of solar variation, PDO/ENSO and the other oceanic cycles. Sometimes they work in unison, sometimes they work against each other and until a formula has been developed to work in a majority of situations all our guesses about climate change must come to nought.”
from here:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/the-real-link-between-solar-energy-ocean-cycles-and-global-temperature/
May 21, 2008
Note that I agree with Bob Tisdale who points out that instead of referring to PDO in this context we should really refer to the Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation (PMO)
Jeez…how much do we pay these people to come up with The Bleeding Obvious !!!!!
M Simon says:
Volcanic activity also seems to correlate with solar activity in the latest interglacial:
http://www.debate.org/photos/albums/1/2/1258/32577-1258-uvv5z-a.jpg
That’s not a “correlation” , it’s a picture !
If you have evidence of a correlation please post it, not crappy hand made graphics which actually show nothing and can be read however you want to read them.