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From Press Release:Four skeptical researchers’ new Chinese Academy paper devastatingly refutes climate campaigners’ attempt to criticize their simple model…
In January 2015, a paper by four leading climate researchers published in the prestigious Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was downloaded more than 30,000 times from the website at scibull.com. By a factor of 10 it is the most-read paper in the journal’s 60-year archive.The paper presented a simple climate model that anyone with a pocket calculator can use to make more reliable estimates of future manmade global warming than the highly complex, billion-dollar general-circulation models previously used by governments and weather bureaux worldwide. The irreducibly simple climate model not only showed there would be less than 1 C° global warming this century, rather than the 2-6 C° the “official” models are predicting: it also revealed why they are wrong. By April, climate campaigners had published a paper that aimed to rebut the simple model, saying the skeptical researchers had not checked it against measured changes in temperature over the past century or more. Now Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Dr David Legates, geography professor at the University of Delaware, and Dr Matt Briggs, Statistician to the Stars, are back with a fresh Science Bulletin paper, Keeping it simple: the value of an irreducibly simple climate model, which explains that the simple model had not been tested against past temperature change because it was designed from scratch using basic physical principles. Unlike the complex climate models, each of which uses as much power as a small town when it is running, the new, “green” model – which its inventor runs on a solar-powered scientific calculator – had not been repeatedly regressed (i.e., tweaked after the event) till it fitted past data. Lord Monckton, the inventor of the new model and lead author of the paper, said: “Every time a model is tweaked to force it to fit past data, one departs from true physics. The complex models are fudged till they fit the past – but then they cannot predict the future. They exaggerate. “We took the more scientific approach of using physics, not curve-fitting. But when the climate campaigners demanded that we should verify our model’s skill by ‘hindcasts’, we ran four tests of our model – one against predictions by the UN’s climate panel in 1990 and three against recent data. All four times, our model accurately hindcast real-world warming. “On the first of our four test runs of our model (left), the 1990 forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel was a very long way further from reality than our simple model’s spot-on central estimate.” [more overleaf ────── Figure 1 Four tests of the simple model’s hindcasts (solid-edged boxes: left) against observed warming. Departures from the green bar (the correct value) are in C°. Test 1: from 1990-2015 against IPCC’s 1990-2015 predictions (dashed boxes: top left) based on 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] C° straight-line warming to 2025. Tests 2-4: based on IPCC’s current estimates of all manmade forcings from 1750 to (2) 1950; (3) 1980; and (4) 2012. The simple model’s hindcasts (1-4, left) always match the real-world warming (the green bar) measured by the HadCRUT4 terrestrial dataset (Test 1) or RSS satellite dataset (2-4), but IPCC’s predictions (top left) have proven wildly above the true position. |
Dr Willie Soon was subjected to a well-funded and centrally-coordinated campaign of libels to the effect that he had not disclosed that a utility company had paid him to contribute to the skeptical researchers’ January paper. Inferentially, the aim was to divert attention from the paper’s findings that climate alarm was based on a series of elementary mistakes at the heart of the complex models. In fact, all four co-authors had written the January paper and the new paper on their own time and on their own dime.
Dr Soon said: “What matters to campaigners is the campaign, but what matters to scientists is the science. In 85 years’ time our little model’s prediction of just 0.9 C° global warming between now and 2100 will probably be a lot closer to observed reality than the campaigners’ prediction of 4 C° warming.”
Dr Matt Briggs said: “The climate campaigners’ attempted rebuttal of our original paper was littered with commonplace scientific errors. Here are just a few:
Ø “The campaigners cherry-picked one scenario instead of many, to try to show the large models were better than our simple one. Even then, the complex models were barely better than ours.
Ø “They implied we should tweak our model till it fitted past data. We used physics instead.
Ø “They said we should check our model against real-world warming. We have. It works.
Ø “They criticized our simple model but should have criticized the far less reliable complex models.
Ø “They complained that our simple model had left out ‘many physical processes’. Of course it did: it was simple. Its skill lies in rejecting the unnecessary, retaining only the essential processes.
Ø “They assumed that future warming rates can be reliably deduced from past warming rates. Yet there are grave measurement, coverage and bias uncertainties, particularly in pre-1979 data.
Ø “They assumed that natural and manmade climate influences can be distinguished. They cannot.
Ø “They said we should not have used a single pulse of manmade forcing. But most models do that.
Ø “They said our model had not been “validated” when their own test showed it worked well.
Ø “They said they disagreed with our model when they merely disagreed with our parameters.
Ø “They said we should not project past temperature trends forward. We did no such thing.
Ø “They used root-mean-squared-error statistics, but RMSE statistics are a poor validation tool.
Ø “They incorrectly referred to the closed-loop feedback gain as the “system gain”, but in feedback-driven systems it is the open-loop gain that is the system gain.
Ø “They inaccurately described our grounds for finding temperature feedbacks net-negative.
Ø “They assumed that 810,000 years was a period much the same as 55 million years. It is not.
Ø “They said we had misrepresented a paper we had cited, but their quotation from that paper omitted a vital phrase that confirmed our interpretation of the paper’s results.
Ø “They said net-negative feedbacks would not have allowed ice ages to end. Yet the paper they themselves cited described two non-feedback causes of sudden major global temperature change.
Ø “They said temperature buoys had found a ‘net heating’ of half a Watt per square meter in the oceans: but Watts per square meter do not measure ‘heating’: they measure heat flow.
Ø “They implied the ‘heating’ of the oceans was significant, but over the entire 11-year run of reliable ARGO sea-temperature data the warming rate is equivalent to only 1 C° every 430 years.
Ø “They said the complex models had correctly predicted warming since 1998, but since January 1997 there has been no global warming at all. Not one of the complex models had predicted that.
Ø “They praised the complex models, but did not state that the models’ central warming prediction in 1990 has proved to be almost three times the observed warming in the 25 years since then.
Ø “They failed to explain how a substantial reduction in temperature feedbacks in response to an unchanged forcing might lead, as they implied it did, to unchanged, high climate sensitivity.”
Professor David Legates said: “As we say in our new paper, the complex general-circulation models now face a crisis of credibility. It is perplexing that, as those models’ predictions prove ever more exaggerated, their creators express ever greater confidence in them. It is time for a rethink. Our model shows there is no manmade climate problem. So far, it is proving to be correct, which is more than can be said for the billion-dollar brains operated by the profiteers of doom.”
The new paper is open-access at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11434-015-0856-2
Keeping it simple: the value of an irreducibly simple climate model
The complex models are fudged till they fit the past – but then they cannot predict the future. They exaggerate.
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No….the complex models are tuned to past temperatures that are fudged..to show a cooler past and a faster rate of warming..When they extend that linear trend line…they cannot predict the future.
Any pocket calculator can extend a trend line….it’s only going to be as accurate as the numbers you plug into it
Expressed as you have, it should be concluded that the models are not intended to “predict the future.” However, that would lead to the land of aluminum hats by a very short route, as soon as one asks, “but then, what are they intended for?”.
Mmmmmm, that would be double fudge then.
Yumm !
Wow, the old HP-35. Bought one in ’74 (that dates me, huh) when $395 was a CHUNK of money. But I was a fanatic. I’ve used HP RPN calculators ever since.
I got one in late 1973, just after some lunkhead stole my slide rule. I slept with that HP 35 under my pillow for several months, and then I calmed down. RPN, which took about one-minute to learn, is the most logical way to perform calculations. I was enrolled in classical mechanics at the time, and used the new calculator to calculate an orbit using Mars to boost probes out to the gaseous giants–would have been a task using the K&E. I find the algebraic calculators to be a misery on complex calculations.
My yellow K+E got away from me around that time as I didn’t keep such a close eye on it with the new electronic power at my fingertips. Around ’74 or so, there was a store in Cambridge which just sold calculators. It was located across the street from that professor who had built a sinusoidal wall around the street side of his home to reflect sound. Those were heady days (and still are.)
I programmed my HP-25 with a 2-D pursuit program. You entered missile thrust and direction stepwise and tried to come within a mile of the bogie at the end of a step. The bogie always had a linear trajectory. The only thing I couldn’t do was indicate when the missile was within a mile. With only 49 steps, the HP-25 couldn’t do everything. Fun, though.
Well… in my shoulder bag, I still have my 14 inch slide rule, thank you very much. See … I don’ let people steal it! No, its not a fancy Keuffel & Esser, Versalog, Pickett or Faber-Castell … but a lowly “Relay”, a 100% bamboo cored lovely from Japan, manufactured in 1962 or so.
25 scales, double sided, 3 sigfigs accurate, with all the electrical engineering scales and ‘undergraduate’ features a boy could want. Needless to say, I don’t just carry the thing around, but I enjoy the pique of internet it adds to situations where I use it. “What’s that?” … etc.
But my favorite calculator wasn’t the HP, although RPN was not a bad way to do math. It was the old SR-52 from Texas Instruments which was my friend. Hopelessly retro (with LED numbers), it sported an amazing (for the day) 224 program steps of memory, AND had a magnetic-strip reader/writer. Now that was great.
NO mag strip? A cute toy, to figure out small problems. Mag strip? Complicated, hard-to-debug, winners.
LOL to history.
GoatGuy
I still have my HP-35 calculator. It might even still work but I’d have to replace its batteries to find out. My favorite was an HP-41C with a barcode reader and I use an HP-15C, HP-48GX and HP-71b with math pack.
In the 1980’s I bought up a few nice aluminum Pickett slide rules for $3 each and every now and then I’ll dig one out and work some simple calculations. It is still a good way to understand logarithms. I’ve found a few online virtual sliderules that mimic the functions of a slide rule visually. Use your mouse to grab the various parts of the slide rule to manipulate it.
http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-es.html
A short while ago my 41C finally quite (after 30 years) … it was tough for a while … I’m not good with change.
It turned out that the “Vintage Calculator Repair” guy used to work in our basement, and is still in the area, so I got the HP fixed without much effort/cost. I think he is still working, so anybody that needs to hang on to their past should get ahold of him for repairs.
I was in an intermediate grade when the students in Lostine got their first look at a calculator. It barely fit on the top of the student desk it was placed on.
Still have my HP-35. Although it won’t work on the battery alone, it’ll work with the battery in the unit and the recharging cable plugged into the wall. But I also like my HP-12C (financial) which does amortization very easily.
I — love — reverse Polish notation.
My solid HP-21 got me through university in the late 70’s. 🙂 Eventually the proprietary battery pack could no longer hold a charge, and the calculator was replaced. To this day I still prefer RPN.
Nostalgia – I’d forgotten the name Keuffel&Esser! Mine dated from 1957 and I’m not sure what happened to it. I bought a TI-84 graphing calculator a few years ago (I still could learn to use several of its features!)
The very Germanic Keuffel&Esser building is a few blocks on Fulton St from where I lived at Peck Slip and South Street in Lower Manhattan : http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-1894-keuffel-esser-co-bldg-no-127.html . I always wondered how many people passed it everyday without realizing the significance of what had been manufactured there .
Wow! What a blast from the past!
My dad was still alive when calculators came out, and he tried to dupe me into going halvsies on one. (They were expensive in 1973 dollars.) I knew he’d monopolize it in place of his Keuffel + Esser, while I’d be relegated to my Versalog–to the extent that I still any occasion to perform such calculations–so I begged off.
But I still have the Versalog. All 24 scales. What a beauty.
When I was in school, I could come close to picking four significant digits off the left end. Now I need a magnifying glass to read anything at all.
Thank heaven for calculators.
An HP 35- good grief, where’d I put my RPN logic?
At first I thought it was a HP-67. My old one is long gone, unfortunately.
I was working at HP in the late 70’s when you could order an option -65 on an HP 3000 minicomputer, which got you an HP 65 calculator – lots of those puppies got smuggled past purchasing departments with that trick…
just think of it as having 4 registers with access to the bottom one which is visible on the led s.
.
Awesome! I have an HP15-C emulator app on my phone. Looks exactly like the real one. I still use the real one at work (from ’84 and was $100- cha-ching!). I still can’t use a regular calculator with parentheses after learning RPN.
I got my HP35 in 1975 when I went back to graduate school. The price had dropped to $350 by then. I still have it, though some of the keys don’t work.
i have one of the originals – the ones that had errors in some of the sine and cosine values I don’t think it’s been turned on since the 1980s.
HP-35, TRUE LOVE!
I knew someone would divert this on to a HP/RPN calculator thread. I couldn’t afford a HP35, even after the price drop when the HP 45 came out. I finally bought a National Semiconductor RPN calculator for doing my taxes one year and later bought HP11C and HP16C (hex/oct) calculators. Still work, I still use them, and no, they aren’t for sale!
Some of the iPhone simulations are pretty good, but they don’t have the great tactile feel of the real ones.
I still have three (and use one at work) HP 41CV and 41C calculators from the early 80s–and a superb HP-42 emulator (look for Free42 on Google Play) on my Android phone… Once a person gets hooked on RPN, there’s no going back.
Don’t know what brought up the HP-35 but it was the revolution of its day .
Our visual psychophysics lab got one right away . A friend was reading Tompkins Great Pyramid book at the time and while the 35 was not programmable , I figured out a keystroke cycle which confirmed what the Egyptians of the day told Herodotus . Glossed over in one paragraph is perhaps the only significant fact in the book : the pyramid was designed so that the square of the height equals the area of a face . The Egyptians got the necessary face angle to accomplish that within a degree .
Current 4th.CoSy is in Forth’s raw RPN which is the inevitable minimal syntax . They are now calling languages with such syntax concatenative
Still have my father’s K&E and its manual , and his later Pickett .
And my Lafayette . Only just now googled what the P scale is . I can see its importance in some areas .
The picture shows the HP-35. Triggered a lot of nostalgia in a bunch of us.
Rex , I see that on the WUWT home page now . I came straight from email and didn’t see it .
Speaking of ahead of its time, does anybody remember the SciFi author Gordon Dickison’s story in the 1977 HP Calculator Digest about ‘Beep’, a personal digital assistant/calculator of the future that had intelligent voice communication linked to a worldwide network that could check calendars, redo airline reservations, etc? It was perhaps the most prescient technology extension story ever, but after nearly 40 years, we finally have most of it in our hands.
There were a few of these in the Chemistry Department Library at Imperial College back in 1974. They lived in locked cradles that were bolted to the table tops.
So much cooler than slide rules but utterly unaffordable on a student grant. 🙂 Quite an unexpected nostalgia trigger.
Well, my slide rule still works and requires very little maintenance.
I’ll better you one, bought an HP-65 at $795 in January ’75 and yes, that was a load of money at that time, I must agree. But those were absolutely amazing machines at that time… so much better than slide rules and mechanical adding machines! If you don’t recall that 65 model, it was, one, programmable and the big two, you could record your programs on permanent magnetic strips. Changed my entire life, not kidding. Best investment I ever talked someone into, 100+ times ROI for the company in just two years.
My home was burgled in February this year.
Among other things, the b@#$%$%^^!!!! stole both my HP-25 and my HP 12c.
In one of the few instances in which the police actually caught the guy, he told them he had thrown the calculators away, and used their vinyl covers to store his drug stash. I would happily have torn him limb from limb for that.
So a couple of months ago, I bought a brand new HP12c; yes they are still available.
Remember how HP used to be a company we all worshipped and dreamed about working for one day? Bah!
The new HP12c is a total piece of garbage and sits unused in my bottom desk drawer
First, it feels all plasticy; the original, made in USA, had a rock solid, “means business” feel. Second, several buttons don’t work. When I opened it up, I saw that several of the components haven’t been soldered to the circuit board. But they are totally inaccessable without breaking the board.
So I went to Google Play Store and bought Android emulators for each of the HP12c, HP15c, and HP21. They cost me a total of around $20.
Not as sexy as the originals, but at least they look good and do the job. And I still have my Hemmi Sun GeoTech 341 slide rule for backup.
Oh, for the good old days when men were men, women were women, and HP was a great company.
Mine was an HP 45, gold button and all. Loved that thing, and RPN is just the beans. It made first year physics pracs a doddle.
They don’t do simple because you can’t hide the result in the method. Well done chaps.
Springer link failed
https://3c-lxa.mail.com/mail/client/dereferrer?redirectUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Farticle%2F10.1007%2Fs11434-015-0856-2
for some reason – it’s using a ‘redirect’ – try this link instead – http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11434-015-0856-2
In simplicity – bullshit has nowhere to hide.
Oops, sorry, I essentially repeated exactly the sentiments of Peter Whale, (above). We posted more or less simultaneously. Well, great minds and all that…
You guys are on it.
In simplicity – bullshit has nowhere to hide.
Gosh, yes.
KISS Keeping It Statistically Simple 😉
The link to the paper gave me an error Keeping it simple: the value of an irreducibly simple climate model without the redirect works much better; now I’ll see if I can read and understand well enough to avoid make a stupid comment!
Thanks for the link.
It’s a refreshing change to see a climate model paper that was prepared and peer reviewed by credible scientists.
I am reminded of an irreducibly simple principle in science: Ockham’s Razor. The Razor is simple: ‘Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’ or if you prefer Aristotle: ‘We may assume the superiority of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.’ Simple models are more easily refuted than complex ones and modern GCM’s are deemed irrefutable by those who are committed to their predictions.
i liked to punch in the numbers that spelt Shell oil looking at it upside down.
If an HP-35 is like my Casio SR-36, you can also do “Oh hELLS BELLS” as well!
710-77345
An older brother taught me that one in the early 70s as: 142 Arabs fought 154 Israelites over 69 barrels of oil, and they fought for 5 years (142 154 69 * 5)… who got the oil?
Richardson et al’s refute is that of a sore loser. Applied common sense seems to be the public enemy of those hotspurs who have not yet realised that their own mare is ready for the knacker’s yard whilst Monckton et al’s racehorse comes in as winner by best descent.
HP 35 … wow, that got the chicks!
I wore mine in a holster on my hip, just like Clint Eastwood.
I have two 12Cs on my desk right now.
My dad has my 15C at the moment.
Long live RPN!
LoL !
Select chicks .
I have to think Pamela was prone to doing a double-take at some science stud sporting an HP 35 😉
Pamela, care to share?
Yes, and nope. What goes on in the science lab stays in the science lab.
🙂
A sciencey gal with a sense of humor … any nerd should be so lucky 🙂
Yes, and nope. What goes on in the science lab stays in the science lab.
I had a phone message once:
The mad scientist is in his lab
He has no time to talk and gab
So leave a message on these tapes
Unless the experiment . . . essssscapes
A couple of days ago I wrote a cute true short story you guys might appreciate.
Did You Win?
http://www.maxphoton.com/did-you-win/
Lovely.
Max, nice short story, you are a treat!
My farmer guy is indeed a calculator user.
It will be very hot in August in the US and in Europe.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_z100_nh_f240.gif
We’re in an El Niño event – it had better be warmer. Energy stored in the oceans is released in an El Niño event and it has to pass through the atmosphere before leaving the Earth system forever. That is what is going on. It is nothing new.
But it’s all downhill from there…
“It will be very hot in August in the US…”
Can’t speak for the whole U.S., but here in central Virginia we have highs in the 80’s, lows in the 60’s predicted for the next 10 days; early fall-like weather. Usually we’re highs in the 90’s, low in the 70’s this time of year.
I’m not looking forward to winter.
I second this. Much cooler here in Central VA than in years past. And honestly, I’ve felt like the last couple of summers have been cooler as well. It’s actually quite pleasant. I’m really liking this hiatus thing…
rip
No heat waves in NYC — so far. Came close once.
Like all of last summer, it hasn’t reached 90F here in the mid-Appalachians. 89F a couple times. But not quite as cool overall as last summer. Wish we would have some hot weather — the inevitable chill is not far away now…..
Here in the inland Pacific Northwest of Washington State, it’s been a roller-coaster with some weeks over 100 and some more seasonal in the low to mid 90s with little moisture from last winter. Hopefully we get a more normal winter with more precipitation.
You just promise.
New hottness — take whatever model you are testing and adjust the historical data to fit.
Even this model will very likely run too hot eventually. Whatever small effect we are having is too small to measure with any degree of certainty or accuracy.
Exactly what I was going to say.
Monckton et al.’s paper was an embarrassment to skeptics and ammunition for alarmists who characterize us as know-nothings. It is a farrago of ambiguities, misrepresentations, bad math, and bad physics.
Now, the authors could instead have satisfied themselves with saying only that they think the climate system’s closed-loop gain most likely falls between 0.21 K per W/m^2 and 0.35 K per W/m^2, with the median of that gain’s probability-density function being 0.26 K per W/m^2, and that for the purpose of determining multi-year trends it is harmless to treat that system as memoryless (i.e., to take the “transience fraction” as unity for such a coarse time resolution). Robert G. Brown has repeatedly said something similar without any objection from me. They could even have said they got their closed-loop-gain range by taking the IPCC open-loop-gain value of 0.31 K per W/m^2 and assuming a loop-gain range of -0.5 to +0.1 with a median at its average, -0.2.
As thus presented, the model would indeed have been simple: you get the temperature change by simply multiplying the forcing change by the closed-loop gain. And in presenting it that way the authors would have been candid in admitting that they’d just pulled the loop-gain values out of the air. That would have fine to the extent that the resultant model works. (if you apply its central, 0.26 K per W/m^2 estimate to the 1.51 W/m^2 forcing change resulting from the RCP CO2-equivalent values for the 63 years preceding 2014, then, in contrast to the impression one may take from the Fig. 6 they apparently put in their initial paper’s press release, you actually get 0.06 K/decade rather than the 0.12 K/decade exhibited by HadCRUT4 for that period, but, hey, we’re just talking about models here, so what’s a hundred-percent difference among friends?)
That’s not what they did in their paper, though. The authors instead purported to derive the memorylessness from the Gerard Roe paper, which says no such thing. They gave the impression that their conclusions were based on their Equation (1), whereas anyone reasonably well versed in feedback theory would recognize that equation to be like saying you can get the product of two numbers by taking their sum. And they got their loop-gain values by chanting “thermostasis” and “process engineers’ design limit.” Dr. Briggs says, “They implied we should tweak our model till it fitted past data. We used physics instead.” What they did wasn’t physics; it was mumbo-jumbo.
The authors tout their Equation (1) as “irreducibly simple.” To the extent that it is used to obtain equilibrium values or results for memoryless systems, however, it is merely a more-cumbersome way of expressing the closed-loop-gain equation, which has been in use since before the authors were born. To the extent that it is used, as it was in their Table 6, to compute transient responses implied by the “evolutionary curves” of the Roe paper, it produces results for the RCP 2.6 scenario that are less than a third of what they should be.
In short, the paper was dreadful.
(And where is your paper? ~mod.)
It sounds like you’re saying their model is no worse than anything else out there, but is accurate, anyway.
Joe: “In short, the paper was dreadful”
And yet, despite your negative assessment, their model comes closer to reality than all the other (more complex and more expensive) climate models. What does that say about the dreadfullness of all the other climate model?
I think the models the IPCC relies on are dreadful, too, whereas some of the simple skeptic models I’ve seen do at least as well or better.
My criticism has nothing to do with how well the model has been shown to hindcast. It’s directed to the theory behind it. In half an hour I could arrive at a model that hindcasts better than theirs does—and so could you. But so what? A proper assessment of such a model would be directed to how I backed the model up, and, at least in my case, the criticism that I pulled it out of thin air would be justified—just as it is justified in theirs. The difference would be that I had not pretended otherwise.
But, since we’re talking about how well their model hindcasts, have you actually gone through the numbers to see how they proved the skill that Monckton et al. supposedly showed by their Fig. 6? If you actually went through that exercise, you’d find their work is smoke and mirrors.
That’s the same response Michael Mann’s apologists had to Steven McIntyre’s objections.
McIntyre did have some publications…
Mr Born’s vindictive tone, which does him no credit and us little harm,will serve to alert readers to the possibility that he has strayed from impartiality into mere spite. This is the person who was previously caught out falsely alleging that I had “refused” to supply information which a) he had sent me no request for and b) had already been supplied in our original paper.
It was anti-scientific of Mr Born to pass judgment on a paper without having read it first. The following are among the many items of evidence that he had not read it:
1. Mr Born says we ought to have written that we were assuming the IPCC’s value of 0.31 Kelvin per Watt per square meter for the Planck parameter lambda(0). Had he read the paper, he would have seen the following statement at the end of our discussion of the lambda(0): “Though the value of lambda(0) may vary somewhat over time, IPCC’s value 0.3125 Kelvin per Watt per square meter may safely be taken as constant at sub-millennial timescales.” Oops!
2. Mr Born refers to the Planck parameter as the “open-loop gain”. However, our paper defined the “open-loop gain” as the system gain G, i.e. the reciprocal of (1 minus the closed-loop gain g, which is in turn the product of the Planck parameter and the feedback sum f). The Planck parameter is not any sort of loop gain. Oops!
3. Mr Born says we should have stated that our suggested values for the closed-loop gain g were -0.5 to +0-.1. Yet this fact is plainly stated in our paper at least twice. For instance: “… model-projected warming falls on 0.8 [0.6, 1.2] K. The narrow response interval is a consequence of the temperature stability where g falls on [-0.5, +0.1].” We even provided, and referred to, a diagram to explain the point further. Oops!
4. Mr Born says we had pulled our suggested values for the closed-loop gain g “out of a hat”. Our paper, however, derived them from two considerations: the near-perfect thermostasis of the climate over the past 810,000 years, for which we provided reviewed evidence (and even Mr Born, who is one for seeing neither the woods nor the trees nor the flowers but only the weeds, may have noticed that the atmosphere is bounded by two near-infinite heat-sinks, which is why the climate system tends to behave thermostatically); and the growing body of literature finding climate sensitivity low (we cited numerous papers). We also mentioned, by way of illustration, that process engineers designing circuits intended not to oscillate were careful to constrain the designed upper bound of the closed-loop gain to at most +0.1. Oops!
5. Mr Born said we had “purported” to derive what he calls the “memorylessness” of from the Gerard Roe paper, which says no such thing”. In fact, we never used the word “memorylessness”. What we said was this: “Where f(t) <= 0.3, for all t, [the transience fraction] r(t) may safely be taken as unity; at sufficiently small f(t), there is little difference between instantaneous and equilibrium response [if Mr Born had read our paper, he would have realized the truth of this statement]. For f(equilibrium) on 2.1 [1.3, 2.9], [and those, if Mr Born had read our paper, are the three values of f we had taken from Roe's diagram], r(t) is simply the fraction of equilibrium sensitivity attained in year t, as shown in Fig. 4.[from Roe]" What is more, we had explained in the caption to our table of values of the transience fraction that these values – not some presumed "memorylessness" were what we had "derived from [Roe]." Oops!
Here, then, are at least five points at which Mr Born has futilely misrepresented what was actually stated in our paper. Since the rest of his turgid posting is mere yah-boo of his usual kind, I refuse to be drawn. Here, therefore, I have done no more than to correct, with actual quotations from our paper, his serial misrepresentations of what it actually said.
It has now been downloaded more than 30,000 times from the website of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And why? Because no small part of its value lies in the brief and yet clear and comprehensive pedagogical explanation and discussion of the principal parameters that determine climate sensitivity, of their possible intervals, and of the mathematical relationships and interdependencies between them. There is nothing one-tenth as clear or one-hundredth as brief as this anywhere in the IPCC's documents.
Mr Born's criticisms, insofar as anything coherent can be distilled from his intemperance, relate more to our choices of values for various parameters than to the construction of our model itself. Time alone will tell whether our predictions will prove closer to observed outturn than those of the far costler general-circulation models. Mr Born's time might more constructively be devoted to studying the numerous downright errors in those models. It is no accident that they are running hot, and that our model – based on physics, not Marxist politics – is generally closer to observation than the billion-dollar brains.
As usual, Lord Monckton misstates both my position and the facts.
I never contended that they had not given that value. I said they should have contented themselves with giving that value and a few other things rather than engaging in some embarrassingly bad mathematics and circuit discussions.
I was dealing with feedback experts while Lord Monckton was still a teenager. They referred to that quantity as open-loop gain: the ratio of response to stimulus without feedback. The terminology they used was that the loop gain equals the product of the feedback and the open-loop gain, while closed-loop gain is given by what Lord Monckton likes to mystify as the “Bode equation.” I see no reason not to use the terminology employed by guys who actually knew what they were talking about, rather than adopt what Lord Monckton and the other johnnies-come-lately in the climate game choose to use.
Again, I never said they hadn’t stated those values. This is a favorite Monckton tactic: argue against a distortion of what his opponent said.
No, there was no derivation. Just as in Lord Monckton’s comment above, the paper merely invoked “thermostasis” and “process engineers” and, presto, -0.5 and +0.1 appeared. He has been pressed in more than one forum for justification of that process-engineer contention, and you will search in vain for any calculation of those loop-gain values from thermostasis. Again, Lord Monckton’s arguments are content-free. He makes cargo-cult arguments, not arguments of substance.
Precisely. That caption is a misrepresentation. It states that every entry in the table’s first two rows was (along with the others) “derived from” Roe. They weren’t—unless “derived” means, “We made them up.” As Lord Monckton seems not to realize, memorylessness is precisely what an all-unity “transience function” means. If the entire equilibrium value appears immediately upon the stimulus’s appearance, then the response is independent of the stimulus history: the system is memoryless.
As I have explained elsewhere, the substance of those table entries’ provenance had been placed at issue several times, and, every time it was, Lord Monckton evaded admitting the fact that, contrary to what the table’s caption says, the authors just made those entries up; those entries were not “derived” from Roe. There may be good reasons for assuming memorylessness at the coarse time resolution with which the paper dealt; I’ve seen some evidence for that proposition. But the Roe paper is not part of it.
I repeat that allegation, which is completely true. Lord Monckton still refuses to come clean about those entries’ provenance.
And, by the way, their contending that their model is based on physics does not make it so.
In the two papers by Japanese physical chemist Kyoji Kimoto in this post, he demonstrates that the canonical Planck parameter is greatly exaggerated due to a mathematical error first made by Cess, Manabe, et al, in making a false assumption of constant effective atmospheric emissivity and then taking the derivative.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/collapse-of-agw-theory-of-ipcc-most.html
Kimoto’s most recent paper demonstrating the Manabe/Hansen/IPCC lapse rate fudge is here and also leads to greatly exaggerated climate sensitivity.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-man-made-global-warming-climate.html
Lastly, a “no change” model for scientific forecaster Scott Anderson, that does require a calculator or any calculations, outperforms the IPCC models by a factor of seven. Does the “no change” model outperform the Monckton et al model as well?
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-scientific-no-change-in-temperature.html
Since Mr Born has lied again to the effect that I had “refused” to supply information for which he had sent me no request, I see no purpose in responding any further to him. Let him whine alone. He impresses no one.
True to form, Lord Monckton hurls a baseless claim and runs from substance.
If my contention were really a lie, he would be able to show either (1) that the table’s caption is truthful or (2) that he had already admitted that it was false. Manifestly, he has been unable to do either.
>
But that’s not my purpose. It’s to amuse myself by goading Lord Monckton into spouting errant nonsense. Unfortunately, there’s not really much sport in it. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
Joe Born, thank you for your critique. It’s quite a bit to digest, but fairly plated. You stated that Moncton et Al was embarrassing for skeptics. I think your sentiments are a bit dramatic. In order for me to be embarrassed by Moncton or Soon etc I need first to believe that they are out of their damn minds making wild claims. The opposite has occurred; they have consistently crushed CAGW using logic, reason and science. For instance, if their deeply flawed model predicts better than the highly touted and expensive models produced used by the IPCC to draw fear from the masses, then why should I be embarrassed… I think CAGW supporters are in a better position to be red faced. And that is a simple, logical argument
Do you really think that the following passage, for instance, is “logic, reason, and science”?
“Also, in electronic circuits, the singularity at g_\inf = +1,
where the voltage transits from the positive to the negative
rail, has a physical meaning: in the climate, it has none.”
The authors have never given a reasoned explanation for that passage–which is not true. That Fig. 5 graph applies to an electric circuit no less and no more than it does to Monckton et al.’s model.
If you’ll notice, almost none of the apologists will touch the substance of my criticism; they just accept the claim that Monckton et al. hindcast the temperature well, change what I say around, or trail off into irrelevancies.
As for me, I like to see more back-and-forth. I usually wind up learning more from those who disagree with me than from those with whom I agree. What I learned from the VeeV was invaluable. The criticism of our paper on Stoat was quite instructive. Our paper is all the stronger for having accounted for it.
Joe, your stuff is a bit above my pay grade, but I little doubt you know a heck of a lot about feedback in circuitry and I have enjoyed and learned from your posts and articles here, thanks. But don’t pooh pooh the idea of analogy in other fields of the experience of the electrical engineer. Nature is wondrous but she does borrow and repeat herself much more perhaps than even scientists and engineers tend to believe. Check out Le Chatelier’s principle which has shown to go far beyond what Le Chatelier (chemist and engineer) himself propounded about perturbation of chemical equilibrium.
“… if a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing the conditions, the position of equilibrium shifts to counteract the change to reestablish an equilibrium. (http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Equilibria/Le_Chatelier%27s_Principle)
This priniciple has proved to have very wide application. One could say that it predicts Newton’s laws of motion, back EMF in an electric motor, behavior of a gyroscope, response of the iris of the eye…. Paul Samuelson, Nobel winning economist employed it in consideration of price effects on economic equilibrium. The underlying principle is essentially the preponderance of negative feedback in systems. This definitely doesn’t belong only to the electrical engineer.
Wikipedia (is okay for some things!) has a good article on this subject and defines the broader priniciple as:
“Any change in status quo prompts an opposing reaction in the responding system.”
This is pretty much Newtonian!
Gary Pearse:
I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re saying. If it’s that circuit analogies to other physical phenomena can indeed be helpful, then I entirely agree. In fact, that’s the point I was making.
Lord Monckton had contended that the equation for closed-circuit gain that applies to electrical circuits is inapplicable to climate systems. Referring to it as the “The Bode system-gain equation,” he says it’s applied “erroneously” to the climate system. “It’s the wrong equation,” he said.
Of course the climate is not an electrical circuit, but I see no reason why that equation is inapplicable to the climate system, and Lord Monckton has made no coherent argument against its use.
But maybe I’m responding to a meaning you didn’t intend.
Spoken like a true Philadelphia lawyer with a grudge LOL.
Back in the late 1970s or early ’80s one of the first big climate modeling projects was underway at NCAR outside Boulder, Colorado.. Rumors on the street were that it took about a week on the Cray to predict tomorrows weather. So, someone had the good sense to shut it down saying computers would have to be at least a order of magnitude faster before it would be useful. It’s obvious hey have reached the same sort of impasse with the current model no one currently there has the cojones to admit it.
When I was at a U Colorado NSF workshop in the summer of 1973, that model was already running, on a CDC Star (I believe their biggest machine, much bigger than the CDC 6600 at UT-Austin) and I heard the same story – by the time the model finished, they could look outside to see if they got the right answer… Of course now I have about that same power on my iPhone.
Any model has value only to the extent that it represents reality. Testing this model is/was an essential step that should have been done as a part of the first paper.
Fair enough, but doesn’t give a beautiful kick when you do it sucessfully later?
The criticism that this simple model should hind-cast the last century of so-called “records”, is based on the assumption that the last century of records is less contaminated by anthropogenically introduced baloney than this simple model.
Modellers seem to have allowed themselves to be deceived by the seemingly confident and assuredly simple presentation of historical temperature data records.
The simple presentation of such data masks the vast uncertainties involved in its collection and analysis and the ad hoc adjustment made, often by ideologically motivated adjusters. As readers of WUWT will be well aware.
Effectively, the demand that this model should retro-fit the product of bucket and engine intake temperature from ocean vessels as interpreted liberally by Phil Jones et al, is more of the usual consensus obsessed bunk.
It is precisely by NOT falling into this trap that such a fresh approach acquires merit.
When seen in this light, the request that the model should satisfy such a test is effectively asking, “why does your simple model not fit with our big heap of wildly and willfully biased and hopelessly inaccurate shlock”.
Of course, a reasonable answer, is, “well, it fits with the satellite era, so maybe your pre 1970’s analysis is a steaming heap of bullcrap. And if so, then that would also explain why all your crazy hindcasted models run hot. Durr”.
Here is what a Met Office paper says about the critically important sea surface temps SST’s.:
“Finally, the estimates of biases and other uncertainties presented here should not be interpreted as providing a comprehensive estimate of uncertainty in historical sea-surface temperature measurements. They are simply an estimate…Until multiple, independent estimates of SST biases exist, a significant contribution to the total uncertainty will remain unexplored. This remains a key weakness of historical SST analysis”.
From: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/part_2_figinline.pdf
Since the fiction-writing gatekeepers have systematically, unjustifiably cooled the past and warmed the present, the model would show its worth if it hindcast hotter than the supposed record.
Yeah, precisely. But the entire enterprise has been trapped in a feedback loop.
The analysis of records was handled by people who believed that they should find worrisome accelerating 20th century warming (to stick on the end of their hockeysticks).
And then this contaminated guff was handed over to the modellers who tested models against it.
Those models which made the past slightly hotter than the contaminated records will simply have been rejected or tweaked.
Ultimately, models were selected that showed a match with the scary fictional past.
And these models create and even scarier fictional future.
This scary future scenario increase the desperate willingness of the data handling dept. to cool the past and warm the present.
And so on…
http://uphillwriting.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/circular-reasoning-works-because.jpg
One of my CAD manuals had the following glossary entries:
Circular reference: See reference, circular.
…
Reference, circular: See circular reference.
“….These models are destroying
The integrity of science,
On their continuous false predictions
There’s now a reliance.
What we see with our eyes
No longer attracts,
And the model’s projections
Are now treated as ‘facts’….”
http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/computer-models/
Can someone briefly explain the following (or provide a link to an explanation): “in feedback-driven systems it is the open-loop gain that is the system gain.” My understanding is that the standard example of closed-loop gain is in a feedback-driven system.
Anybody with a modicum of understanding of physics will know that ocean currents are one of the more important, if not the most important, factors in the the distribution of heat over the planet.
There are three aspects which dominate ocean currents: the north-atlantic oscillation, the pacific decadal oscillation and the sloshing of the pacific we know as the El-Nino-La-Nina phenomenon.
The lithmus test for any ocean-atmosphere coupled climate model is, or it should be, therefore that those quasi-periodic oscillations emerge naturally from the simulations with about the correct timescales and amplitudes. None of them do. This tells you everything you need to know.
+1
It is all about the oceans.
But unfortunately, prior to ARGO we have no worthwhile data, and even ARGO is suspect because (I) once rolled out the buoys that showed cooling were discarded, and (2) it has never been tested for bias; the free floating buoys that are swept along on currents which currents are themselves density/temperature related may introduce a bias (warming or cooling), but this has not been tested/verified, and (3) there is insufficient spatial coverage, and (4) the data length is too short to draw meaningful conclusions.
Got my HP in 1973 while in grad school…bookstore sold them on time–$20.00/month. The only way most of us could afford them. Served me well through a PhD. Switched to a 12C and still use it. I still like RPN. When I was teaching college algebra my students never asked to borrow (and not return) my HP like they did the TI’s.
I still have my Commodore 64, and the model can be executed in basic, and my wife keeps asking why I keep the thing around.
In response to Asher, the climate journals tend to be rather cavalier with their use of terms borrowed from process engineering, so we defined the terms we were using at the outset. The closed-loop gain factor, in the climate, is the product of the Planck parameter and the temperature-feedback sum. The open-loop gain factor, or system gain factor, is the reciprocal of (1 – the closed-loop gain factor). Those were our definitions, which we got from a process engineer who has also studied the climate profoundly. They do appear in the better papers on climate feedback too.
Actually, the climate sensitivity interval our paper found may turn out to be on the high side. Professor Ray Bates, in a fascinating recent talk in Moscow, reaches the conclusion that climate sensitivity may be well below ours. And no one knows more about feedbacks than he; and, what is more, he is in what the true-believers would regard as the “mainstream” of climate science.
In the two papers by Japanese physical chemist Kyoji Kimoto in this post, he demonstrates that the canonical Planck parameter is greatly exaggerated due to a mathematical error first made by Cess, Manabe, et al, in making a false assumption of constant effective atmospheric emissivity and then taking the derivative.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/collapse-of-agw-theory-of-ipcc-most.html
Calculation of the Planck parameter using physically correct methods reduces climate sensitivity to 0.1-0.2C as shown by Kimoto in the above papers.
Could Lord Monckton comment Kimoto’s claim, please?
Commodore 64 was the last machine I ever had where I could understand and use the complete disassemble of the operating system. I also had FORTH on a cartridge that provide a good compromise between the compactness and speed of assembler and ease of programming on the inbuilt BASIC interpreter.
FORTH was/is a fun language.
If you are interested in such things , check out my open 4th.CoSy . The more minds involved , the faster it will evolve .
The Reva Forth it is being built in is by itself a rather well fleshed out x86 programming environment . I’m really just adding an array vocabulary simplifying and generalizing the notions well presented by my friend Morten Kromberg in a Google Tech Talk ( see http://cosy.com/CoSy/4th.CoSy.html#comment-2179573280 ) .
But I must admit my quotidian uses of 4th. CoSy are simply being my log and remembering all my bloody passwords , no grand planetary model — yet .
I am more than happy to give more credence to the Monckton et al model than the warmist’s models (all 87 of them) for the following reasons:
a) They agree with past temperature data, without having to adjust it.
b) They show a small temperature rise, which would be expected from the physics (the bulk of CO2 in the atmosphere is not directly or indirectly man-made).
c) The team do not need to falsify results to maintain an income, which 100% of government funded scientits (this typo was not deliberate, but I have left it in because it made me smile!) do.
d) The warmist’s models all show warming that is not reflected in reality, and the divergence of temperature is so great that not all of them can be correct.
e) I might get shot down in flames for this one because it is my logical speculation. Standard models did not predict the pause in GW for 18.5 years. Why? Because their predictions for warming were too high to begin with. 4-6 degrees a century equates to 0.4 – 0.6 degrees a decade, in other words the world should be almost 0.8 – 1.2 degrees warmer since the start of the pause. These figures show a theoretical rise over the same period of 0.2 degrees, the fact that this has not happened could be down to natural variability, the higher figures most certainly could not.
Well done Christopher, Willie, David and Matt!
Most grateful to Mr Harding for his kind words. Whatever else one may say about our simple model, it is accessible to all who can beg or borrow a scientific calculator (I’ve had mine for a decade and the Sun powers it), and it is constructed as a vehicle for reaching the truth and not a deus ex machina for propping up a predetermined conclusion. At least we have tried to get it right.
Christopher,
This is brilliant work. In the long run you and all those who are fighting for the integrity of science simply cannot lose. I could write pages about this stuff, but I’ll summarise it with just two words:
Thank you.
Chris
The warmist’s models all show warming that is not reflected in reality, and the divergence of temperature is so great that not all of them can be correct.
Unless it is reflected off a heat sink? That produces a divergence, alright.
Whatever else one may say about our simple model, it is accessible to all who can beg or borrow a scientific calculator
Toldja back when that you could make a better model on the back of an old envelope, didn’t I, melord? And so you did! Top-down. My congratulations and hearty approval. And to whatever extent you erred, it’s fixable. All you have to do is drop in any changes. Can’t do that so much with those bottom-to-top spaghetti things the IPCC does at $10k a pop on a machine costing the GNP of a small country.
Well said, thanks!
I can’t understand that graph no matter how long I stare at it or read the description
In response to Mary Brown, the graph shows four separate runs of the simple model over four separate periods using “official” forcings as inputs. Since all four periods are in the past, we can tell what the true temperature change over each period was. The green line represents the true, observed temperature change. The values in Celsius up and down from the green line represent departures from the true temperature change. In all four runs of our model, the green line lay on our range of predictions. In the first of the four, where the IPCC had also made a prediction, it is shown to have been an enormous exaggeration.
Any defect in the comprehensibility of the diagram is my fault. I was trying to pack rather a lot of information into a small space.
Thanks for that explenation. I now understand that graph.
Thanks. But what are the orange and blue bars ?
People will rightly point out that this “simple model” isn’t perfect. It is actually over-simple, obviously. It can clearly be improved upon.
It doesn’t pretend to be perfect. Nobody ever claimed that it was.
Maybe it should be chucked out immediately and replaced by a superior approach.
BUT – isn’t that the point?
The fact that it performs BETTER at matching current trends than multi-million dollar computer models reveals the seriousness of the almost immediate failure of almost every single one of these models.
Some people will say that this simple model is amateur crap.
Then that is an even greater indictment of the computer models that it out-performs.
Then the conclusion is that amateur crap produces a better correspondence with reality than multimillion dollar computer models.
Isn’t that the point?
That’s also maybe why it has caused so much irritation to the “consensus” obsessed.
Ridiculing it only make it’s superior performance seem even more remarkable.
Upthread you were decrying those of us that say that models must be compared with data. Now you are saying this one performs better, but how can you judge it to be better without comparing the model results to data?
Some confusion here. I have discussed two very different periods of data collection.
Upthread, I was critical of the comparison with historical data, of questionable accuracy. I used the example of early 20th century bucket measurements of SST’s.
Here I am saying that this model shows better correspondence to the satellite era trends.
Specifically the RSS/UAH/radiosonde trends that have nothing to do with engine intakes and UHI problems.
So, I am not contradicting myself at all. I do not decry comparison with data. Since that is the essence of science. But the data must be known to be good data. We should not be manufacturing our hypothesis to correspond with poor data which is contaminated by a vast array of known and unresolved biases of unknown sign or significance.
Surely, the question that Monkton et al, set out to discuss – is why do models run hot in the current era of modelling. Not, why do they not predict sea surface temperatures as measured by buckets in 1910.
My own view is that any fool can predict the past…
It’s the future that seems to pose the greater problem.
And so far, computer models seem to struggle to predict the present!!
The only real data that matters to a forecast model is the skill at forecasting out of sample data in the real world.
Given that the entire concept of “climate” is a generalization of weather over some span of time, and forecasting weather is irreducibly complex, the wonder is not “how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all.”
It’s not precise enough or expensive enough or complicated enough! All these 3 things are de rigeur for any government product!
There is also the statement that simple models usually work in limited (or defined) circumstances. Classic examples are those related to motion i.e. F=ma, v=at. In all cases of normality (what we can see) they work so well that they are the basis of “rocket science”. It is only in the case of the “abnormal” that they fail.
Just because a model is simple does not mean that it is not useful in the bulk of instances, in fact the complex models may hide more than they demonstrate.
When it comes to complex, chaotic systems, top-down beats bottom-to-top 9.5 times out of ten. Like Climate. Or a war. Any hardbitten wargame designer knows that much. Only the newbies fall into that trap. We are dab hands at hindcasting and all too aware of the perils of forecasting.
I was always taught to – KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid,
that way you can find any errors.
Yup.
“Dr Soon said: ‘What matters to campaigners is the campaign, but what matters to scientists is the science.'”
The challenge is to get the press and the public to seek and discern the campaigners from the scientists! Campaigners are sensational and scientists are boring in the eyes of the masses. So many drink the kool-aid because the sensation brings drama to their otherwise boring lives. The media ratings go down when “all is well” and politicians lose the “fear factor” to push their agendas.
The media has brainwashed the public to think that conflict is necessary to prove one’s place in society.
RE HP-35
If the clunky battery charger looks like it was designed by a mechanical engineer, it was. My first assignment at HP was to design and tool the charger. Later, I worked on the chem milled beryllium copper tactile feed back of the key board. I also found ‘Fabradon II’ a print style that when two color plastic molded, made the letters and numbers look very crisp to the eye. I still have two 35’s and one still works. I bought the first on that had a ‘low’ on/off switch. Back then I chewed my finger nails to the quick and had trouble working the switch. I brought it to the team and the switch was changed to a ‘higher’ switch. What I didn’t know is that everyone on the development team got a 35 which is why I have two.
Thank you for a fine product.
Yes. I had an HP-45.
All the climate models are bad, this one is just less bad.
So, the simple model papers are available for free downloading, but the rebuttal is behind a paywall?
Maybe I missed it, but did some angel arrange for the simple model texts to be free?
Or are the authors of the rebuttal somewhat less than willing to allow their arguments to be viewed by the great unwashed masses?
The Heartland Institute very generously agreed to fund the open-access fees for both of our papers. But perhaps it is becoming harder to find funding for the true-believing side of the case, now that the discrepancy between prediction and outturn is as wide as it is.
Lest we forget… several years ago, Willis Eschenbach distilled the climate models performance/outputs down to a simple black box equation.
Willis Eschenbach has a keen eye and a delight in calculation, just for the sake of finding out what the answer is. That is how a true man of science operates, in an atmosphere of continual wonderment and of growing excitement as the truth is approached. These characteristics shine through in his postings here, which I have often urged him to collect in a best-selling book.
There is also value, though, in getting a simple model and its predictions of not so much global warming peer reviewed and on the record. For the time will come – you heard it here first – when governments will establish enquiries to find out how and by whom they were misled, and who profited at taxpayers’ expense. When that happens, the investigators will go back through the literature and find our paper (whose predictions will turn out to be far closer to observation than those of the billion-dollar brains).
And they will see the various attempts of the usual suspects to lie and cheat and wriggle and sneer in response to our paper. And they will deduce that a small but nasty and vociferous section of the scientific community had engaged in a monstrous freud. Then the prosecution will begin. Then, and only then, will science begin to recover from the damage these wretches have caused at such profit to themselves and at such loss to everyone else.
+1000
I long for that day and I agree it will come. All the sooner and thanks to the tireless efforts and dedication of people like yourself and the scientists who refuse to bow to the manipulators and crooks of our society.
“a monstrous freud”
Is this a simple typo, or a brilliant multi-layered pun ?
No prosecutions. Let the facts be known and convey their damnation. Producing “martyrs” would be counterproductive. Look at climategate. The bad actors paid — dearly — and in the coin with which they were most unwilling to part. I wouldn’t change places with any of them, not for all the grants in Vicksburg and all the gold in Acapulco. Hoisted by their own cravats, they are. Just let them twist slowly in the wind.
In the long term, they are their own worst enemies, unless they choose to become our best friends: They are faced with the choice of being shining examples or horrible warnings. Either one suits me. Fiddle peer review? Let ’em! That always comes back to bite them in the ass in the long run. That’s why their papers are always falling flat within a month of publication. When your teach told you that cheating on exams was only cheating yourself, he wasn’t kidding — that one was for real.
There will never be any prosecutions since the establishment is in on the game, and are the worse offenders.
One can understand that politicians may not understand the science. One can even understand that politicians may tend, without question, to accept the science as presented to them by government approved scientists, and one can therefore understand that politicians may truly accept that CO2 is a problem and the global emission of which needs to be curtailed.
However, even if one accepts all of that, even a school child (say of 14) would readily appreciate that the policy response is misconceived and does not result in the meaningful reduction of CO2.
Carbon taxes/carbon credits does not reduce global CO2. It merely exports CO2 emissions from one place to another. In fact it could lead to increased CO2 emissions because of the need to move raw material to place of production and the finished article to the market of consumption.
The only form of energy production available today that would result in really substantial reductions in CO2 emissions is nuclear. Going nuclear is the only feasible response should one sign up the evils of CO2, and yet there has been very little progress in that regard since the AGW scare took off in the 1980s.
As soon as one appreciates that the sun does not shine at night, and presently we have no means of large scale energy storage for storing surplus energy when the sun is shining (hydro being a very limited option in some places), one immediately knows that solar cannot provide a significant saving in CO2 emissions since conventional backup is required from fossil fuel powered generators for the time when the sun does not shine, or when the grazing angle is low especially in high latitude countries in the Autumn, Winter and Spring.
As soon as one appreciates that wind is intermittent, and presently we have no means of large scale energy storage for storing surplus energy when the wind is blowing (hydro being a very limited option in some places), one immediately knows that windfarms cannot provide a significant saving in CO2 emissions since conventional backup is required from fossil fuel powered generators for the time when the wind does not blow.
Whilst windfarms may produce about 22 to 24% of their nameplate capacity leading one to (at first glance) presume that this means that fossil fuel generation is not required for 22 to 24% of the time thus leading to a reduction in CO2 emissions of some 22 to 24%, this is not in fact the case because of the manner in which the conventionally powered fossil fuel back up generation has to be run in ramp up/ramp down mode which results in no saving in CO2 emissions. We all drive a car and we all know how urban driving with its start/stop characteristics consumes about 50% more fuel than running the car at a steady/constant 60mph (100kph) on a freeway/motorway, and this is the same for the conventionally powered back up generation. Having to be used in ramp up/ramp down mode produces almost the same amount of CO2 as had the back up generator been left running at designed output all the time.
These are school children errors in the political response to the AGW/CO2 alarmism, and it is politicians who make and force implementation of policy. The policy response is misconceived since it does not result in the reduction of CO2 emissions and merely puts up the cost of energy. In fact, I would say that mitigation is in itself an obviously misconceived policy, and adaption is patently to be preferred. Again, that is a political failing.
Politicians cannot afford to see a proper enquiry into this farce because at the end of the day it is their policy response which has been so misguided, no matter what the science may or may not say or truly be.
Lest we forget….Willis Eschenbach distilled the climate models performance/outputs down to a simple black box equation that gives the wrong answer!
So here is a different and slightly more complicated model that seems to be pretty good at giving the right answer.
I am embarrassed as a Canadian that our government has been funding one of the worst extant climate models. For a very large saving of cash we could have had a free one that works much better.Why are the modellers not ashamed of their bilking the public out of so much money? Is there some character test you have to fail to become a climate modeller?
A fine response above from Richard Verney.
Thank you for the paper NOT being paywalled! Richardson and Haufs… is on the same springer site!
Energy balance models cannot be invalidated by general circulation models.
The contrary is true.
A way to escape the necessity to have energy in balance (over time) is to believe that energy is accumulating on the long term in the oceans, the evidence of which is scant; and the mechanisms to release such hypothetical accumulation is not provided.
Similar model as the one discussed here, with a similarly simple approach:
http://climate.mr-int.ch/index.php/en/modelling-uk/two-layers-model-uk
http://climate.mr-int.ch/index.php/en/modelling-uk/primary-forcing-uk
http://climate.mr-int.ch/index.php/en/modelling-uk/feedback-uk
With which Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity is calculated at 0.4 to 0.8 K per doubling CO2, meaning that only 25-30% of the observed warming can be attributed to CO2.
http://climate.mr-int.ch/images/graphs/ts_forcing_by_co2.png
How much energy has been accumulated in the oceans long term?
After approximately 4.5 billion years of solar irradiance plus DWLWIR, the average temperature of the oceans is only about 3 to 4 deg C. This does not suggest that the oceans accumulate much energy long term.
Thanks for all your wonderful work.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Dr Willie Soon, Dr David Legates, Dr Matt Briggs and Willis Eschenbach just to mention a few.
Good men one and all.
While my interest is in understanding ( implementing ) the physics reconciling within 1% our observed mean temperature with the energy we receive from the sun before attacking the 4th decimal place variations we’ve seen over the last century or are likely to over the next , I’ll stick with my irreducibly simple empirical model : linear extrapolation . And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it overestimates coming warming .
http://cosy.com/Science/CO2vTkelvin.jpg
Monckton. I find myself in the same position as Mary Brown in not understanding your diagram at all. First What is the significance of the different orange and turquoise colouring in the columns?
What is it that your models match.? Is it eg in column 4 the RSS temperature in 2012 based on the IPCC forcings from 1750 2012 when entered into your models as the text seems to say? But if that is so the RSS data only runs from 1980 – how does that relate to IPCC forcings from 1750? When you say “match ” I suppose you mean that the output range straddles the green( Real ) line.?
Unless one is completely familiar with your ” simple’ model procedures it is hard to extract any clear meaning from your diagram.
Looking at all of history, it is apparent that climate sensitivity can not be significantly different from zero.
If you understand the relation between mathematics and the physical world, you understand that, for a forcing to have an effect, it must exist for a period of time and the effect of the forcing is calculated by its duration. If the forcing varies, (or not) the effect is determined by the time-integral of the forcing (or the time-integral of a function thereof).
The CO2 level has been above about 150 ppmv for at least the entire Phanerozoic eon (the last 542 million or so years). If CO2 was a forcing, its effect on average global temperature (AGT) would be calculated according to its time-integral (or the time-integral of a function thereof) for about 542 million years. Because there is no way for that calculation to consistently result in the current AGT, CO2 cannot be a forcing.
Variations of this proof and identification of what does cause climate change (R^2 > 0.97) are at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com
“If you understand the relation between mathematics and the physical world, you understand that, for a forcing to have an effect, it must exist for a period of time and the effect of the forcing is calculated by its duration. If the forcing varies, (or not) the effect is determined by the time-integral of the forcing (or the time-integral of a function thereof).”
Absolutely, which as you (and others) have clearly demonstrated rules out CO2 as a forcing and shows the time-integral of solar activity is the forcing, (modulated by ocean oscillations, which are lagged effects of solar forcing).
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wLCEUB9Aw28/U-cGLCEaBPI/AAAAAAAAGMQ/NAl4KtFKmog/s1600/sunspot+integral+2.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/S1vF1X3GdLI/AAAAAAAAAs0/okk6loUxm_o/s400/Fullscreen+capture+1232010+75750+PM.jpg
Endosperm you remove from the eyes.
those were the good old days !
when calculators were simple things that liked simple calculations, many a happy lesson was spent finding someone with a Texas Instrument, a quick flick of ` 0 inverse tan` would send it into a loop and the only way to clear it was unplug the battery. or to prove they had program errors like by `2 squared, square root` only took a couple of runs to show it didnt get back to 2 again. and the shiny Casios with the stonking coils and capacitors inside that occasionally went into meltdown.
the best trick was an fm radio and a casio, everlasting sound of applause as the radio interference kicked in, I gave my `build your own` sinclair RPN to my son a couple of years ago and showed him the `lunar landing` programme.
happy days
Those who are also having problems downloading the paper may try instead directly:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11434-015-0856-2
Worked here.
Testing of either simple or complex models against history requires that that you should know what that history was like.There are several breakpoints in the twentieth century temperature record where the mechanism controlling production of the temperature curve changes. It is not permissible to use statistical smoothing methods willie-nillie to eliminate such differences.One obvious break-point is in 1940 corresponds to the sudden introduction of World War II cooling. With it the warm spell that started in 1915 comes to an end. Records that show warming in the forties are dead wrong. The first half of the forties was a deep and bitter cold that is variously distorted in temperature curves. Even 1947 was still so cold that a blizzard shut down the City of New York for several weeks. The next thirty tears were simply recovery from that cold wave and temperature did not reach 1940 levels again until about 1979. In the late seventies there was a temperature rise that stalled out about that time. From then on till 1997 there was no temperature rise of any kind and a hiatus existed for 18 years. That one is missing from the official temperature curves because it was eliminated by over-writing it with a phony global warming curve. What it eliminated was the hiatus of the eighties and nineties. It was covered up by a fake warming called :late twentieth century warming. The official temperature curve that shows this warming must be corrected to show a thirty year horizontal step in the middle of the smooth temperature rise they feature. I am ignoring the El Ninos also present in this region as oscillatory features of the temperature curve. In 1999 a short step warming rose to connect it with the next hiatus. In only three years it raised twenty-first century temperatures up by one third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. This was actually the only real temperature increase during the swatellite era that began in 1979. Hansen quickly claimed that such temperature rise could only be caused by greenhouse warming. He was wrong – physics does not allow you to turn it on and off like that. The following temperature regions now have to be separately analyzed for any model comparisons. The first one is the warming from 1915 to 1940. Second is the cooling and recovery from 1940 to 1979. Next is the hiatus of the eighties and nineties.The step warming that follows it in 1999 connects the hiatus of the eighties and nineties with today’s hiatus. And the last region for model testing is the present hiatus, from the end of step warming until today. This division of the global temperature curve must always be observed when analyzing its properties. Using a single statistically smoothed curve to represent the entire temperature history is impermissible.
This is Arno Arrak’s comment in readable paragraphs:
Testing of either simple or complex models against history requires that that you should know what that history was like.
There are several breakpoints in the twentieth century temperature record where the mechanism controlling production of the temperature curve changes. It is not permissible to use statistical smoothing methods willie-nillie to eliminate such differences.
One obvious break-point is in 1940 corresponds to the sudden introduction of World War II cooling. With it the warm spell that started in 1915 comes to an end. Records that show warming in the forties are dead wrong. The first half of the forties was a deep and bitter cold that is variously distorted in temperature curves. Even 1947 was still so cold that a blizzard shut down the City of New York for several weeks. The next thirty tears were simply recovery from that cold wave and temperature did not reach 1940 levels again until about 1979.
In the late seventies there was a temperature rise that stalled out about that time. From then on till 1997 there was no temperature rise of any kind and a hiatus existed for 18 years. That one is missing from the official temperature curves because it was eliminated by over-writing it with a phony global warming curve. What it eliminated was the hiatus of the eighties and nineties.
It was covered up by a fake warming called :late twentieth century warming. The official temperature curve that shows this warming must be corrected to show a thirty year horizontal step in the middle of the smooth temperature rise they feature. I am ignoring the El Ninos also present in this region as oscillatory features of the temperature curve.
In 1999 a short step warming rose to connect it with the next hiatus.
In only three years it raised twenty-first century temperatures up by one third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. This was actually the only real temperature increase during the satellite era that began in 1979.
Hansen quickly claimed that such temperature rise could only be caused by greenhouse warming. He was wrong – physics does not allow you to turn it on and off like that.
The following temperature regions now have to be separately analyzed for any model comparisons. The first one is the warming from 1915 to 1940. Second is the cooling and recovery from 1940 to 1979. Next is the hiatus of the eighties and nineties.The step warming that follows it in 1999 connects the hiatus of the eighties and nineties with today’s hiatus. And the last region for model testing is the present hiatus, from the end of step warming until today.
This division of the global temperature curve must always be observed when analyzing its properties.
Using a single statistically smoothed curve to represent the entire temperature history is impermissible.
It is easy to read in this format, and there are a number of good points made.
The satellite record, like all data sets has issues, but to the extent that it is valid and (reasonably) reliable, it is the case that there have been TWO ‘pauses’. The first as from launch (1979) up to the onset of the Super El Nino of 1998, and the other following that natural event to date with a simple one off and isolated step change in temperatures coinciding with the 1998 Super El Nino which step change appears to have been driven by that natural event.
I have been commenting on this for years, and I am surprised that whenever recent temperature are examined, or the ‘pause’ looked at, or articles on climate sensitivity are raised one rarely sees any discussion that there are TWO ‘pauses’ not one in the satellite temperature data sets.
Much of the warming seen in the land based thermometer data sets as from say the mid 1970s is likely to be an artefact of data adjustment/homogenisation and/or pollution by station drop outs and UHI. This is perhaps why Michael Mann’s (Briffa’s) tree rings showed no warming in the period mid 1970s up to early 1990s and why Michael Mann decided that instead of using tree ring data post the late 1960s/early 1970s in his seminal paper/hockey stick plot, the land based thermometer record should be spliced onto his series to show (rapid) warming when in fact there may well have been no warming at all.
To sometimes reach stupid conclusions is human, to reach ridiculously stupid conclusions you need super computers.
That is a crucial criticism. It is a false ‘a priori’ premise of the ‘climate campaigners’ that change must be manmade and natural changes are background noise.
John
As the real value of CO2 is zero, obviously any model that is closer to that figure than current models will perform better. Doesn’t change the fact that your models would be worthless if you applied them to Venus or Mars. Until you accept that gravity, mass and incoming solar energy are responsible for virtually all the average temperatures and that atmospheric composition (especially in regards to trace gasses) is almost entirely irrelevant, there is no hope for you!
They complained that our simple model had left out ‘many physical processes’. Of course it did: it was simple. Its skill lies in rejecting the unnecessary, retaining only the essential processes.
We call that one “top-down” in the game biz. I have been shouting out for top-down model design for years now. The errors are easy to spot and correct. Alternate scenarios are far more easy and relevant. There is no “crack-the-whip” going on with the data.
We are finally seeing it happen now with several new models — all of which show lower CO2 TCR and ECS than IPCC CMIP 3 or 5.
So called ‘Man made global warming’ is not about science…it’s about money. The global economies are broke (200T in debt and climbing) and the pols don’t have the guts to increase taxes or cut government so they are using this fraud, the world is going to end, as their tool to scare people into paying hundreds of billions of dollars a year in higher energy taxes to fight an imaginary problem. The result will be massive economic turmoil, unemployment and death of millions (mainly in third world countries).
‘Our model shows there is no manmade climate problem.’
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And there’s the whole crux of the issue. There simply ISN’T a man-made problem. But that is a decidedly unwelcome observation, hence the tsunami of climate lies.
Warming, yes. Problem, not so much.
As worthless as any other climate model.
What a farce, a model where most of the science is unknown.
Reblogged this on JunkScience.com and commented:
Predictions are difficult, especially about the future. I suppose we are to be more impressed by the size of the wizard’s machine.
do we have to wait til the end of the century to judge whether the KIS beat the IPCC – or is there a shorter timeframe – both sides in this debate seem to be declaring victory based on their superior logic – but i want to see their methods matched against Reality before deciding
This paper fails in a fundamental way: if you use Monkton’s predicted gain of roughly 0, you get essentially zero signal in the little ice age and other historical and paleoclimate excursions. For the little ice age to be caused by TSI variation, the gain needs to be roughly 2, and at least 1.5 based on the most extreme estimates of solar variation.
I make no pretense of understanding the technical arguments in these comments, but I can certainly spot a logical fallacy: Appeal to authority.
Joe Born:
Apparently, you can’t.
Lord Monckton was contending on his say-so that the “Planck constant” was not an open-loop gain. I said that, since others had said otherwise, I saw no reason to adopt the nomenclature on the authority of someone who, trust me, is in way over his depth. This wasn’t appealing to my authority; it was declining to defer to his. (Incidentally, the “Planck constant” can, at a different level of abstraction, be considered a closed-loop gain instead; see Fig. 6 here. The issue has layers.)
Moreover, my experience is that those like Lord Monckton who rest their arguments on nomenclature rather than substance tend to be lightweights. Not equal to the rough and tumble of real substance, they bluster.
If you want to make a substantive argument, I’ll be happy to handle it. So far though, I recall encountering only one substantive objection, which I was happy to entertain.
Frankly, the other comments have been so shallow as to give me the impression that, despite the ravages of age, I’m sometimes still the smartest guy in the room–by a large margin.
Of course, that can’t be; there must be lurkers out there who are capable of discussing these issues more creditably than I. But so far I’ve seen no evidence for that possibility. So, if you’re one of those lurkers and are hiding your light under a bushel, please, take your best shot; I’m bored.
Otherwise, here’s a tip. The Monckton et al. paper is a test of one’s ability to think critically. So far, you aren’t doing so well. Try harder.
The remarks that I characterized, as suffering from a logical fallacy were not substantive, themselves, sir. They were simply a proclamation of superiority. Quid pro quo. That’s my critical thinking for today.
“Dr Matt Briggs, Statistician to the Stars”
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Great tag line and excellent blog Dr. Briggs hosts over at his site. And well done authors!