WUWT readers may remember ultra climate activist David Roberts, a self described “climate hawk” who wrote regularly for Grist, and became so burned out he had to take a year off from the “climate wars” to recharge. It seems that hiatus may have done him some good. In case you’ve never heard of it, the web magazine “Grist” is sort of like a Pravda version of the Whole Earth Catalog. They have a staff, a budget, and a swanky downtown office. Unlike climate skeptics, it’s a well funded organization.
Roberts as you may recall, once called for Nuremberg style trials for climate skeptics. Here’s what he wrote in 2006:
When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these [climate skeptic] bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.
Over on Vox.com a few days ago, David Roberts wrote an essay about climate modeling uncertainty loops. In his Vox essay, Roberts noted that climate modeling didn’t really have any skill out to the year 2100::
Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.
Grappling with this kind of uncertainty turns out to be absolutely core to climate policymaking. Climate nerds have attempted to create models that include, at least in rudimentary form, all of these interacting economic and atmospheric systems. They call these integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and they are the primary tool used by governments and international bodies to gauge the threat of climate change. IAMs are how policies are compared and costs are estimated.
So it’s worth asking: Do IAMs adequately account for uncertainty? Do they clearly communicate uncertainty to policymakers?
The answer to those questions is almost certainly “no.” But exactly why IAMs fail at this, and what should be done about it, is the subject of much debate.
One of the other things he notes is that climate model uncertainty is probably underestimated. Bold mine.
Or to put it another way: Think about how insane it is to try to predict what’s going to happen in 2100.
There is a school of thought that says the whole exercise of IAMs, at least as an attempt to model how things will develop in the far future, is futile. There are so many assumptions, and the outcomes are so sensitive to those assumptions, that what they produce is little better than wild-ass guesses. And the faux-precision of the exercise, all those clean, clear lines on graphs, only serves to mislead policymakers into thinking we have a grasp on it. It makes them think we know exactly how much slack we have, how much we can push before bad things happen, when in fact we have almost no idea.
In the view of these researchers, the quest to predict what climate change (or climate change mitigation) will cost through 2100 ought to be abandoned. It is impossible, computationally intractable, and the IAMs that pretend to do it only serve to distract and confuse.
Yep, but as we head into Paris and COP21, will anybody be able to stop the freight train built on this uncertainty? Perhaps, there are signs it may already be coming off the rails. Climategate 4 anyone?
Stay tuned.
Note: within about 10 minutes of publication, the first paragraph was updated to include a link to the “climate hawk” label mentioned in the title.
That’s a spurious question, more CO2, more sunshine, more rain equal faster growing lawns and trees, which in turn means more staff to take to the dump, bigger and better lawn mowers and more fuel to power them. We are trying to shut down the evil Hydrocarbon industries not make them bigger!!! Some people…..
Naturally they call themselves Climate Hawk only type of hawk left all others killed by wind farms.
Funny!
Still waiting for the ….. “never mind”….. moment.
Roberts better be careful as a ‘Climate Hawk’, he better watch out for those pesky Bird Blenders, AKA Windmills. One of those favored renewable energy sources that are 3 times as expensive as coal, and beak down too often. Windmills don’t discriminate …
even very fundamental climate assessments contain much more uncertainty that is acknowledged in their forecasts. for example, here is what happens when you include the IPCC’s own stated uncertainties in the IPCC’s carbon budget.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2654191
I agree that trying to predict the climate in 2100 is futile.
How about next Monday?
The weather service doesn’t appear to get that right very often.
As with most predictions, especially about weather (Climate which is the 30 yr average of weather apparently), is that those making the predictions reliably get them wrong most of the time. So I simply look out the window these days.
The desperation of Leftist warmunists is palpable.
None of their projections are coming even close to matching reality.
All the warmunists can do is come up with dog-ate-my-homework excuses for why their projections are so hilariously wrong, and to fiddle with the raw data to make their huge errors less laugh inducing…
Under any metric of the Scientific Method, the CAGW hypothesis is already disconfirmed, and should be run through the wood chipper…
But, alas, the Paris Climate Circus awaits to negotiate even more government tyranny for a problem that doesn’t exist, to steal more money and power from their citizens.
What Roberts is saying about the economic projections modelling is so obvious that it is blindingly obvious, and what we are saying about climate modelling is equally obvious.
The only explanation I can think of to explain why people like him do not see this, is that it is an act of faith. it is simply unquestionable
You seem to think that they are looking for truth, when they are really trying to find an excuse to control people and whole economies.
So David Roberts took a year off and became skeptical of the alarmist propaganda on global warming. I would guess that he spent quite a bit of time viewing WUWT (as well as other realist sites) and contributed to the current count of 249,443,240 views of WUWT. By the way, that’s nearly a ‘half a billion’.
Ignorance can be cured by knowledge.
You can only forecast the climate, if you understand the mechanisms involved. But what if these so-called ‘scientists’ have chosen the wrong climate drivers and feedbacks?
Take a look at the following Vostok temperature graph. Note that all the Interglacials warming periods terminate at about the same temperature. That cannot be a coincidence. So what are the drivers and feedbacks that ensure that the max Interglacial temperature is always the same, even when hundreds of thousands of years apart?
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/figures/Figure6ao.gif
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The driver or forcing of Interglacials is obviously the precessionary Great Year summer season in the NH. Take a look at the following graph, where all the recent Interglacials (red diamonds) occur at the peak of an (idealised) Great Year summer season. So the primary driver of Interglacials is axial precession, not axial obliquity or orbital eccentricity – because all Interglacials occur at the peak of a precessional Great Year summer season.
(The Y-axis insolation curve is the same as the precessionary Seasonal Great Year, which is why it has a 21.7 k year cycle. NH summers at the top, NH winters at the bottom. Each Interglacial starts at a red diamond and moves to the left for a few thousand years, and terminates at the appropriate green circle.)
http://s17.postimg.org/a8i2wv3e7/iceage_precession.jpg
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And the reason for the Interglacial warming always stopping at the same temperature, is that all the ice sheets have melted at the peak of the Interglacial. Ergo, the primary warming feedback during Interglacials has to be reducing albedo via reducing ice, not CO2.
In which case, CO2 is merely a bit-player in this climate drama, and the star of the show is actually albedo. And if albedo is the Interglacial feedback mechanism our current climate cannot get any warmer than at present, because there is very little ice left to melt. Which would mean that ALL of the climate models are totally wrong, because they have misunderstood the fundamental mechanism.
Ralph
Yeah, “ALL of the climate models are totally wrong, because they have misunderstood the fundamental mechanism”, but?
What was the position in the Holocene Optimum with regard to the ice sheets?
There is good reason to consider that Holocene temps have peaked, and were at their peak at the time of the Holocene Optimum. Of course, that is not known for sure.
There have been a number of warm periods during the Holocene, which we do not know or understand what drove them, but it may well be material that each of these warm periods appear to have peaked at a slightly lower high than the previous warm period, such that it appears that the planet is on a downward trend back into the throes of the ice age, that the present inter-glacial has (fortuitously for mankind) interrupted.
Consider that; the Holocene Optimum was warmer than the Minoan Warm Period, which was warmer than the Roman Warm Period which was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period, which was warmer than the present late 20th Century Warm Period.
Of course, we do not know yet whether the present late 20th Century Warm Period is over, and perhaps it will carry on warming into the 21st Century and if it does so, possibly it may exceed the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period. But if there is no resumption of warming, the possibility exists that temperatures may decline and the present warming will have peaked at the end of the 20th Century at a level below that of the Medieval Warm Period. It may be that for some time temperatures will decline and it may be a considerable time before there is another bout of inter-glacial warming.
Since we do not know or understand enough, we do not know how the Holocene will develop.
>>Since we do not know or understand enough, we do
>>not know how the Holocene will develop.
Oh, I think we have quite a good idea. During an interglacial, world temperature follows the Seasonal Great Year’s NH summer and autumn season, as the following graph shows.
(This image is Milankovitch insolation at 65N, so it includes precession, obliquity and eccentricity. But by far the biggest effect is the precessional Seasonal Great Year (SGY), which is why the peaks here are 21.7 k year apart and substantially replicate the SGY cycle. So maximum NH insolation and forcing equates with the NH SGY mid-summer.)
NH insolation vs temperature. The insolation is proportional to the SGY season.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri15/BIGw02-milankovitch-and-temperature.png
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Since we have long passed the mid-summer of the SGY, which peaked some 11,000 ears ago at the start of the Holocene, it is not surprising that temperatures have fallen slightly over the last 10,000 years. We are in the SGY autumn season, and we should expect cooler temperatures in the autumn. In fact, it is amazing that world temperatures have withstood the negative forcing of the SGY autumn so well.
In which case, there is a distinct possibility that the max interglacial temperature peak 125 k years ago, in the graph above, should be slightly to the right of its present location. In reality, insolation may need to fall quite substantially, during the SGY autumn, before the temperature follows. Which would make sense. So there may be a 5,000 year counting error in the ice-core layers, and the last interglacial peak should be displaced to the right. (I did see this error speculated in a geological paper somewhere.)
From this, we can make some future predictions.
As can be seen on the following graph, we have already reached the lowest point in the current SYG cycle. Because of orbital eccentricity there is no deep SGY winter this time around, and the seasons of the SGY become very shallow for the next 50 k years. So if the climate requires the full negative forcing of a SGY winter, before the temperature falls into an Ice Age, then we are not going to see another Ice Age for another 50 k years or so.
But we may see a gradual decrease in temperature to reflect that we are firmly in the SGY autumn, with much less NH forcing than earlier in the Holocene. So if CO2 is a warming agent (and I think the claims for CO2 are grossly exaggerated) then we should be releasing as much CO2 as possible, to counter the continuing Holocene cooling.
NH insolation into the future. The insolation is proportional to the SGY season.
Greater amplitude equals greater seasonal strength or variability.
A simply procedure that must come into place is to ban all climate related models in political issues or research papers until they can be shown accurately enough with observed data to predict a set numbers of years within reasonable required standard. This still promotes the use of models as a reasonable tool, but eliminates them until they can be shown valuable. This procedure is required for the sake of future science and reversal of the increasingly pseudoscience, where the modeler can show absolutely anything and not be criticized for any of it. This leads to a current model procedure based on huge assumptions/faith by the modeler with no resistance to any possible insanity of the claims.
Nonetheless, I still predict that we’re doomed.