Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The paper is Douville et al. (2015) The recent global warming hiatus: What is the role of Pacific variability? [paywalled]. The abstract reads (my boldface):
The observed global mean surface air temperature (GMST) has not risen over the last 15 years, spurring outbreaks of skepticism regarding the nature of global warming and challenging the upper range transient response of the current-generation global climate models. Recent numerical studies have, however, tempered the relevance of the observed pause in global warming by highlighting the key role of tropical Pacific internal variability. Here we first show that many climate models overestimate the influence of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on GMST, thereby shedding doubt on their ability to capture the tropical Pacific contribution to the hiatus. Moreover, we highlight that model results can be quite sensitive to the experimental design. We argue that overriding the surface wind stress is more suitable than nudging the sea surface temperature for controlling the tropical Pacific ocean heat uptake and, thereby, the multidecadal variability of GMST. Using the former technique, our model captures several aspects of the recent climate evolution, including the weaker slowdown of global warming over land and the transition toward a negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Yet the observed global warming is still overestimated not only over the recent 1998–2012 hiatus period but also over former decades, thereby suggesting that the model might be too sensitive to the prescribed radiative forcings.
That’s something you don’t normally see from the climate science community.
[Thanks to blogger Alec aka Daffy Duck for the heads-up.]
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All the scammers are just looking for the next scam. They are fishing here, fishing there just see if they can get a bite.
That’s all fine, but what I’ve learned is that CAGW just pushes the date further out. A recent conversation, (today) which differs markedly from the gotta so something right now statements, but equally the same and I quote…. ” it won’t be in your or my lifetime, but with all the co2 the planet is getting progressively warmer, and poles are melting. ” Nothing has changed. I thought for sure that the last quite in the solar cycle and the sudden return of winter, the drought ending in the west US, would have at least caused them to think that MAYBE they might be wrong. They just plough ahead with the warming will return with a vengeance. I don’t think anything will change there minds, not even a return to a full blown little ice age ( or a big one) …. CAGW will have caused it.
Beg to differ. There will always be another cause, since there always has been. But I think it is possible to put a ‘stake through the vampire heart’ of this particular analogy to tulip bulb mania. Their resorting to the old ‘move the goalposts’ play is evidence.
What is so interesting, this is the first ‘global mania’ since internet and mobile access. On one side, UNFCC, IPCC, Obama, MSM like NYT, Guardian, and SciAm. Plus all the dirty climate science establishment tricks exposed by climategate. On the other side, a global rag tag guerrilla warfare band of bloggers, ‘renegade’ climate scientists like Lindzen and Curry, and capable citizens like Nic Lewis, Steve McIntyre, and Ross McKittrick. With a bit of help from Mother Nature, the rag tag guerrilla warfare side is now winning, and the ‘settled science’ side is self destructing—slowly.
Each of us on the guerrilla bands side can do our own things in our own ways to help. Like my link for Bob above, or the two last books. Pick up whatever ‘arms’ you have, and carry on.
Pushing the date further out, yes. They did that for the first several IPCC reports. Each report would offer models of what temperatures would look like over time based on the date they were released.
The problem, of course, is that the changes are small and it takes literally decades to accumulate enough of a temperature change to be able to test the success or failure of the predictions. If they update their models with every report, you can never actually test the validity of the models because the date at which you might have enough change accumulate to test them gets pushed further and further out.
Since they year 2000, they have now changed it so that each model must be tuned only up to the year 2000, and after that it is allowed to vary. The new problem is that the confidence intervals are ridiculously large. IF temps between now and 2100 go up by anywhere from 1.5 degrees to 6.5 degrees, they will fall into the confidence interval of most models. That’s like predicting that tomorrow the high temperature might be anywhere from 0C up to 37C. Even if it does hit that range, the prediction is meaningless because it’s so vague.
Rud Istvan
February 11, 2015 at 1:52 pm
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I too believe sceptics are winning and it is entirely possible to stake the AGW vampire through the heart.
You are right when you say their will always be another “cause”, but a number of factors have combined to force the fellow travellers in this sorry hoax to keep digging their collective hole deeper when they should have given up long ago.
Today the fellow travellers in the AGW hoax are no so much fighting for the cause, but fighting to save their own income, careers and reputations. They, like the authors of this paper, are praying for a “warming but less than we thought”soft landing for the hoax. The truth, CO2 does not cause warming it causes immeasurably small cooling, is too devastating to even contemplate.
The factors I see sustaining the hoax are –
1. The Internet. The lame stream media, complicit in the hoax, are no longer the gatekeepers of opinion or record. They can no longer erase the record of any fellow traveller’s involvement in the hoax. Every pseudo scientist, activist, journalist and politician involved has left a permanent, instantly accessible record of their inanity on the web. If the hoax goes down, so do they.
2. No good “next cause”. The leaked document from the UN meeting in Switzerland showed some of the next causes planned. They were Bio-Crisis, Sustainability and manufacturing a Fresh Water Crisis. The problem is that if AGW goes south, these new causes are no good. They are all eco crusades, and the public won’t by another from the same sprungers.
3. Politics. AGW was the ultimate “gottcha” for free market democracy. Every fellow traveller opposed to free market democracy dived into AGW boots and all. Every activist, journalist and politician of the left. If AGW is discredited, so too is an entire generation of the professional left.
4. Money. “If there happens to be a trough, there will be pigs”- Pushkin
The reasons for continuing the hoax have nothing to do with real concern with the environment. Now it is all about the self interest of the craven and venal.
Hope this threads correctly.
Konrad, yup. Read my first book, Gaia’s Limits, for confirmation.
WARNING. Even my son says is a bit of a data slog, not a beach read.
Second book arose indirectly from first. Addresses your points with multiple examples. Easier read; even the EPA’s Chevy Volt mpg is wrong! Regards
One can only hope. I saw today the watermelon people out there protesting the use of coal/ CoSpgs, CO. Of course it’s a mice day. I am hoping that the next – 18 F day they don’t turn the heaters on using electricity from that Drake fired coal plant. Or complain about the cost if they replace it.
Rud,
I have downloaded the essay, and will give it a read. However in reading the synopsis, I noted a somewhat “Malthusian” flavour.
In exchange for your (and amazon’s) $8.50, I would ask that you also view this excellent video –
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/
(Warning video does contain the incurable infection of foaming Climatitis (at the end) but is otherwise mathematically correct)
Wealth is the answer, to poverty, increasing population and pollution. If this is delivered by coal, who cares? The environmental benefit is so great. And, after all, adding radiative gases to our radiatively cooled atmosphere does not reduce its ability to cool our solar heated oceans.
Does this paper change the “97% Consensus” to ~96.7% ?
“current-generation global climate models”, yes the current models are wrong and all previous generation models are also wrong.
It bears remembering that the modelers have been “refining” their models since the 1960’s. Back then they had a good idea of what atmospheric CO2 levels were and a pretty good grasp of how they would increase over time. They had also calculated the experimental radiative forcing of CO2 to exquisite precision, even using computers to assist them.
But despite having a good understanding of these two most fundamental components of every global temperature model, they have completely and utterly failed to predict future temperatures. The Nixon White House discussed a 1965 report saying that by the year 2000 CO2 would rise by 25%, temperatures would rise by 7 degrees, and sea levels would go up 10 feet putting NYC and DC underwater.
If they can’t “refine” their models to accurately predict temperatures after more than 50 years, there is no way that CO2 is doing what they claim. If it was, they would have solved it long, long ago and current-generation models would be terrific at predicting future temperatures. Heck, they can’t even hindcast the known temperature record with much certainty after being tuned to reproduce it.
So if they fudge the models Wind Factors it is more accurate than fudging the wave factors.
This is called “backfilling” – an attempt to set up a plausible escape. “Oh darn, that model just put 27x on the “prescribed forcings”! Who could have known? We’ll change it in the morning to 0.0027x, which is where it should have been. My bad!” When many of these folks go to prison – real prison, not the Michael Milken spa – for defalcating the people of the USA, I will be satisfied.
The discrepancies between CAGW projections vs. UAH/RSS satellite temp data is now around 2 standard deviations and growing. By 2020, the discrepancies could well exceed 3 standard deviations, with almost a quarter of a century without a global warming trend….
It has now been almost 19 years with no global warming trend, Arctic ice is recovering, Antarctic ice is setting 35-yr records, polar bear populations are up 6 fold since 1950, no increasing trends of severe weather incidence/severity for 50~100 years, ocean pH stuck at 8.1, sea level rise stuck at 7″ per century, CH4 stuck at 1.7ppm, etc., etc., etc….
NONE of CAGW’s projections are coming even CLOSE to occurring. It’s only a matter of time before the discrepancies and inaccuracies of the CAGW hypothetical projections become so untenable, the drip..drip..drip of doubt expressed in this Douville et al. (2015) paper will soon become a steady stream, and eventually becoming a torrent of doubt.
I wish that your optimism is realised, but as this is now taking on the properties of a religion the abstract symbolism (the models) will be held in higher esteem than the measured physical reality Eventually, if it follows the track of the world’s great religions, the symbolism will so dominate that it will be the political actions in mitigation of the effects of a supposed evil that will be the centres of attention and the conversation about climate change, warming etc. will be forgotten.
Somehow I doubt this paper will be widely distributed.
I guess the remark about models can be linked to a observation of global dimming and global brightening.
Since 1985 northern hemisphere has received more sunshine due to less clouds.
(Martin Wild-American meteorological society January 2012)
Has anyone picked up the significance of “prescribed radiative forcings”.
I read into this that the authors want to hint that the ‘prescription’ is at fault but seem not to want to come out and say so explicitly – am I wrong in making tis inference?
Miti, you might misunderstand. The prescribed radiative forcing is the difference beween incoming sunlight, and outgoing sunlight (albedo reflection) plusinfrared. When infrared is ‘retarded’ by GHG (not really what happens-read essay Sensitive Uncertainty in Blowing Smoke for a clearer non-technical explanation) the planet should warm some. The present radiative forcing is measured by satellites at the top of the armosphere (again an oversimplification) and presently is on the order of 0.6w/m^2. It goes up as CO2 goes up in a logarithmic fashion; for CMIP5 a CO2 doubling from here takes it up to about 3.7w/m^2. That presumed future forcing path (for CMIP5 say RPG 8.5 doubling by some year) is prescribed to the models, which are then supposed to simulate what the Earth does in response. And the pause shows they are failing to get this correct. This new paper (see the link I posted upthread) says EVEN IF you fiddle the Pacific SST to a more NIno condition(Kosata pause explanation), and EVEN IF you also fiddle tradewinds to a more Nino condition (England explanation) the French GCM model still runs way too hot.
Well Rud, the problem with your definition of prescribed radiative forcing, is that it includes an assumption that the difference (that radiative unbalance “forcing”) all then becomes a part of the “heat” (noun) that is then made from that net radiation.
But that simply is not the case. Only part of that immediately becomes heat mostly stored in the ocean. Much of the rest does not become heat but becomes biological and other materials triggered and powered by radiation energy.
That’s why Trenberth can’t find that heat; it was never made in the first place. Remember we get NO heat and NO light from the sun. We make the heat here on earth, and the light is all in our heads.
Now of course that bio-mass does eventually reach a dead end, and somehow end up as “heat”. But in the case of a radiative forcing created tree that heat can be decades or centuries down the road.
And any time delay between radiation coming in and escaping in speed of light time frames, and the conversion of the remainder to heat, results in a net cooling effect.
Just as the very short time delays by which GHGs delay the exit of LWIR radiant energy emitted from the surface, results in a warming because more solar energy comes in during that delay; so too does a time delay between incoming radiant energy and its conversion to heat result in a net cooling.
And the bio-sequestration of incoming solar radiant energy, is a considerably larger cooling effect that GHGs are a warming effect, because the consequent delay from radiation to heat is very much longer than any conceivable GHG delays.
Trenberth can’t find the heat, because it isn’t ; it’s wood and salmon and seaweed.
g
The climate science community is in the process of bifurcation, between those with the integrity to follow the data wherever it leads, and those who choose the role of climate activists and advocacy researchers who will double down and become ever more shrill.
Its like a classic letter of criticism – Start off nice “all is well with the theory, blah, blah,……….and finish with the criticism….”Yet global warming is still overestimated”. I think Anthony should have a section called the “The Long Walk Back” because this is going to be a growing feature of the ‘debate’.
The reason the models matter is that they express the hypothesis of AGW as predictions. When they fail, it means the mechanisms postulated are wrong in some serious respect. Attempts to adjust parameters run the risk of setting up more and more unrealistic input assumptions, and make the models run “goofy” on output. And soon violate the hypothesis’ assumptions.
So we are observing death throes of a “theory” stretched beyond tolerance.
I confess that I might be singlehandedly responsible for the fiasco of the global climate models over-predicting temperatures; yes, I am partially joking but there is a substantial probability that I am right. All of it started in 1986 when I was working for a defense contractor on an atmospheric model that predicted brightness of the atmosphere in response to massive inputs of energy, such as from a high altitude nuclear explosion. This was necessary because the sensors for the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (Reagan’s Star Wars Program) were to be infra-red telescopes either in orbit or at high altitude. An increase in atmospheric brightness would limit the sensitivity of these sensors.
Just for background, a 1meter diameter sphere at room temperature emits roughly as much power as a 60 watt light bulb but it’s in the infra-red spectrum. So, these sensors are trying to see what is equivalent to a 60 watt light bulb against a background that may be very bright with a lot of structure. If the Soviets were to detonate a nuke up there with more re-entry vehicles in the same field of view, the sensor might never see them. In fact, one of the nightmare scenarios was the Soviets detonating a series of 1 Megaton bursts in a chain extending from Soviet territory over the N. Pole and down across Canada to blind the sensors.
To investigate the problem, large computer codes were written using the Air Force Geophysics Lab atmospheric model, the best available at the time. These codes tried to input the energy in various forms and then keep track of all the energy flow through the various chemical species and their absorption and re-emission of infra-red light. It used large numbers of coupled partial-differential equations and divided the atmosphere into a 3D grid and solved the system over time to predict the atmospheric radiance over a line of sight. It is pertinent that this code from 1986 is the basis of atmospheric models used for the climate models of today.
How could they know if the code was right in its predictions? It had to be tested but there is no way you could do nuclear explosions in the atmosphere to do so. However, in the early 60s, there was a US atmospheric test series in the South pacific with explosions at various altitudes. There were two aircraft with primitive infra-red telescopes looking through the burst area to determine radiance. They were not too sophisticated because at the time they were worried more about radar effects. However, it was my job to compare that old data with the predictions of the code.
At early times, say a few seconds after the burst, the comparison was good because everything was ionized but as the atmosphere cooled the difference between model and data was bad, really bad. If the sensors were this bad, there was no way to see incoming nukes in such a situation. However, the sensor designers said they were going to look in a narrow infra-red band where they said there were very few radiating molecules so these old broadband sets of data were not a good prediction.
Somebody had the good sense to say, “We still need to validate the codes with real data”. The only reasonable simulation of an upper atmospheric burst happens to be an intense aurora so a series of experiments were planned in which infra-red spectrometers would be rocket launched from Alaska into an intense aurora and look into the infra-red bands that were supposed to be clear. These experiments were partially successful but all the data showed the desired “window” to be filled with infra-red. The modelers couldn’t believe it and blamed the experimenters for designing flawed experiments. “The spectrometer was looking through air emitted from the spectrometer housing” they said so the next experiment pumped all the air from the housing. Next they said that “there was lower atmosphere air “entrained” with the rocket as it rose” so the next one had the spectrometer separate from the rocket before the spectrometer began looking. Every time they got a bit of data, the modelers pooh-poohed it saying, “There’s nothing up there to emit in that band”.
At this point it had become my job to compare the rocket spectrometer data with the models. The modelers thought that the only thing that would emit in that band was either H2O or OH or maybe O3 but there just wasn’t enough up there they thought. Right before one meeting, I found an interesting article concerning micro-comets made of mostly water and CO2 entering the atmosphere and NASA actually had some pictures of this happening. I brought the article in and said “Maybe this is your source of water”. For some reason, nobody liked this explanation but they all agreed that the model should be changed to input a higher level of water to see if it would predict the observed radiance. The modelers refused to do so and the experimenters weren’t familiar with the model so they made me do it.
It was just a few lines of code among many thousands and I didn’t bother to comment it. Basically, it fixed the amount of water at high altitude considerably higher than the modelers expected. It was to be run to see what was predicted and then changed back.
The model was to be run on the fastest supercomputer of the day and would take several days of supercomputer time so it was scheduled a month and a half later.
Now, I’m an experimental physics geek and hated this modeling, I wanted to get my hands on real instruments where I could turn the knobs. Suddenly, I was offered a job with a different contractor doing real experiments and I happily took it. My computer run with the modified Air Force Geophysics Lab Atmospheric model was in the quea to be run.
I don’t know if it was run but I did hear that the problem wasn’t water vapor. Because the modelers wanted nothing to do with this change to the code and the experimenters didn’t know the code and I never commented my changes, I doubt anybody but me knew any change had been made. I doubt it has ever been changed back unless someone went through the thousands of line of code line by line. Due to the classified nature of the program, I was not even permitted to discuss it with anybody to tell them to change the code back because my classification permission was changed to an entirely different type.
What this means is that if the same atmospheric model is used as the basis of the climate models (and I think it is) then it will over-predict absorption of infra-red emitted by the earth hence over-predict warming. I am responsible for the fiasco but nobody believes me.
Don’t feel guilty David. It is really hilarious.
I liked the use of ‘outbreak’ and ‘nudging’ in the abstract. Revelatory.
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