Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
In February 2016 climate scientist Dr. John Christy presented testimony to Congress demonstrating that climate models grossly exaggerate and over estimate the impact of atmospheric CO2 levels on global temperatures . Dr. Christy noted in his testimony that “models over-warm the tropical atmosphere by a factor of approximately 3″.
NOAA climate activist scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt challenged Dr. Christy’s work claiming that it was “partisan” and using vague statistical arguments claimed that Christy’s work improperly presented the performance of climate models. These claims by government scientist Dr. Schmidt peaked the interest of statistics expert Steven McIntyre who was one of the most prominent experts to expose the flawed science (proxy shenanigans) and mathematics (statistical errors) behind the now disgraced thousand year long global temperature profile infamously known as the “hockey stick” (https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2005/09/ohioshort.pdf).
Mr. McIntyre conducted a review of Dr. Schmidt’s claims (https://climateaudit.org/2016/05/05/schmidts-histogram-diagram-doesnt-refute-christy/) noting that his analysis evaluates the diagram used by Schmidt allegedly supporting his claims against Christy by “first discussing the effect of some sleight-of-hand and then showing that Schmidt’s diagram, after removing the sleight-of-hand and when read by someone familiar with statistical distributions, confirms Christy rather than contradicting him.”
Additionally Mr. McIntyre provided expert findings of his review of the statistical results of Dr. Christy’s work as showing that climate models were indeed “over warm” in their projections as follows:
- a model run will be warmer than an observed trend more than 99.5% of the time;
- will be warmer than an observed trend by more than 0.1 deg C/decade approximately 88% of the time;
- and will be warmer than an observed trend by more than 0.2 deg C/decade more than 41% of the time.
McIntyre concluded:
“The bottom line is that Schmidt’s diagram does not contradict Christy after all, and, totally fails to support Schmidt’s charges that Christy’s diagram was “partisan”.”
Climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry has prepared a new presentation (highlighted in 56 slides) on climate issues (https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/spe-curry-final.pdf) which addresses many climate science topics including global temperatures and the growing divergence between actual temperature measurements and the overly warm exaggerated temperature projections of climate models.
She notes in her presentation that the latest 2013 UN IPCC AR5 climate report presented information showing (slide #24) how climate models over state and exaggerate projections of global temperatures versus actual measured data. Dr. Christy’s Congressional testimony data on climate model global temperature exaggerations is also included in her presentation (slide #25).
In addition to climate models over exaggerating global temperature projections these models also have failed to account for the behavior and impact of major natural climate variation events such as those associated with ENSO as discussed in the Watts Up With That article “Once Again El Nino Didn’t Do What Was Forecast. Why?.
In his article Dr. Ball notes that
“The IPCC claimed with 90% certainty that global warming is due to human CO2. Lack of data combined with omission or lack of understanding of major mechanisms are major reasons why all past, present, and future predictions are wrong. The same is true of major events within the Earth/atmosphere system like El Nino or ENSO. As it is more frequently said these days, if your predictions are wrong the science is wrong.”
Naturally occurring El Nino events have and continue to influence increasing global temperatures and temperature trends and have done so multiple times every decade. (http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm).
Dr. Curry’s presentation provides global temperature data that show natural climate variation associated with the strong El Nino’s of 1997-1998 and 2015-2016 as well as other smaller El Nino events have major impacts on recent increasing global temperatures and temperature trends (slide #13). Some climate alarmists have claimed that man made CO2 emissions are causing recent increasing global temperatures and temperature trends but these claims inappropriately ignore the significant strong EL Nino influences on recent temperatures.
The impact of El Nino events is present in both surface temperature and atmospheric temperature data measurements (slide
#14) as well.
Climate alarmist media such as The New York Times drone on about recent record high global temperatures in 2016 being caused by man made CO2 emissions. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/science/2016-global-warming-record-temperatures-climate-change.html?_r=0 ) However these alarmist claims are based upon arbitrarily minimizing and understating the importance of the strong El Nino of 2015-2016 as the driving force behind these recent warming temperatures and temperature trends as clearly illustrated in Dr. Curry’s presentation.
Analysis of global temperature data shows clear exaggeration and over statement of projected temperatures by climate models versus actual measurements as demonstrated by both Dr. Christy and Dr. Curry’s work. Additionally the significant impact of natural climate events, such as El Nino’s, on recent global temperatures and temperature trends is clearly evident but unaddressed in climate model results as noted by Dr. Ball.
Climate alarmist scientists and media seek to downplay and ignore the demonstrated failures of climate models to provide valid temperature projections as blatantly exposed by the ever increasing temperature divergence of these models results from actual measurements as well as for these models failures to address natural climate event impacts such as El Nino’s.
Dr. Curry notes that the climate change issue is a “wicked” one (slide #46) and that both the problem and solution have “been vastly oversimplified”. Proposing costly and bureaucratically burdening climate policy actions based on poorly performing and scientifically inadequate climate models is simply not justified.
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Obama may find that compared to the surface curvature of the sphere chicago the real earth is big – and flat. From the eyes of a man with feets on the ground.
Some observations and comments.
1) Figure 1 seems to suffer from the same fault as the speedomenter. The predictions are for surface and the measurements are satellite and balloon.
2) Slide from Judith Curry titled “Growing Divergence. Climate Models vs Surface temperature Observations” clearly has the current temperature well within the CMIP5 predictions, and close to the top of the IPCC prediction. Far from growing divergence, the predictions and observations seem to have converged.
Can someone explain why this is growing divergence?
I quote: “2015 was striking as ‘warmest year’ since there had been very little warming since 1998.”
Tirst, the temperature curve that goes with that statement is all wrong. It shows a stepwise increase of temperature tor the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the El Nino of 2010 actually higer than the super El Nino of 1998. This is absurd. Satellite data show a step-wise decrease, not not increase, of the first four peaks in that graph. I regard this as an additional falsification of ground-based temperature curves yhat has a history which started with the wipeout of the hiatus in the eighties and nineties. Furthermore, it is not permissible to compare directly the temperatures of the twentieth and twenty-first century years because of an abrupt change at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It so happens that immediately after the departure if the super El Nino a short step warming raised the global temperature up by one third of a degree Celsius. It took only three years, from 1999 to 2002, to do that and was caused by the huge amount of warm water that the super El Nino had carried across the ocean. If you wish to compare the twenty-first century warming with the twentieth century you must first subtract that extra third of a degree from the twenty-first century values you use. This is necessary if you are looking for warming caused by the global greenhouse effect because that step warming was quite certainly not any greenhouse warming. I find that if I do thos the twentieth and twenty-first century warmings become pretty much equivalent.
Climate models do work.
You could not be more wrong!
You falsely assume they are being used to predict something.
In fact, they can’t predict anything, because no one knows what causes climate change, other than assuming the sun must have something to do with it.
The purpose of climate models is to scare people.
After enough people are scared, they can be told what to do, and how to live.
Who would believe Al Gore, Obama, and the Pope, about a coming climate change catastrophe …. unless there were PhD scientists and SuperComputer Models ‘standing behind them’ ?
Would you believe a prescription drug commercial without an actor wearing a lab coat and stethoscope, pretending to be a doctor?
No one would believe the leftist climate scaremongers without the “Hollywood” science props — well paid PhD climate modelers and their confuser models.
The models do not have to predict anything — they just have to predict something bad in the future.
Nothing bad ever happens — we’ve been waiting 40 years for the coming climate catastrophe … that must have gotten lost, because it never comes — in fact, the climate is better than ever today — but the future is always bad news according to the models.
The strategy: If you don’t do what we leftists say, Earth will turn into “hell”.
This is just a secular version of religious leaders’ old strategy to control people (if you don’t do what we/God says, you will go to “hell”).
The only difference: The religious scaremongers make you pack suitcases and travel to “hell” … while the secular scaremongers just let you stay where you are — “hell” will come directly to you!
I think they are both nonsense, but that’s just me.
Now that I’ve insulted just about everyone’s beliefs, I’ll go outside to enjoy the wonderful climate
… where I will be surrounded by people who believe in all sorts of things without proof:
Heaven and “Hell”,
coming back to life after death,
Obama is a Muslim,
Hillary Clinton didn’t break any laws,
and the biggest tale of them all,
from the Coming Climate Change Catastrophe Cult:
CO2 is going to end life on Earth as we know it.
My Climate Change Blog for non-scientists:
Free
No ads
No money for me
A public service to help people enjoy the current climate,
and ignore the crazy leftists, who apparently can’t be happy
unless they are predicting a coming environmental catastrophe
of some sort, and telling everyone how to live.
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
There are groups progging “the mother of all hot summers” this year for the US. Seriously? With La Nina kicking in and the North Atlantic also starting to wobble, that is highly doubtful. Can’t make this stuff up … it’s shear insanity.
The fact that almost all the strong evidence for the AGW alarmist position comes from the arctic, while adequate countervailing evidence to demolish the alarmist case can be found elsewhere (the antarctic where ice mass is increasing, the lack of the “hot spot” in the troposphere over the tropics, the lack of fit between the alarmist models and observation) has always suggested to me the need to find a proper scientific explanation not for global warming, but for arctic warming.
The lowering of arctic albedo due to soot is the most obvious explanatory theory for arctic warming, and seems to be confirmed by both observation and modeling. It is quite possible that this is, indeed, an instance of anthropogenic climate change (yes, that is a real phenomenon — the urban heat island effect and the moderation of climate in the Great Plains which occurred when the Corps of Engineers built lakes provide two examples).
It is, however, not one which serves the purpose of the globalist left. The solution would be for the Russian Duma and Chinese National Peoples Congress to adopt analogues of the American Clean Air Act, and enforce them to reduce soot emissions from their coal-fired power plants and other industries. This theory, however, does not provide an excuse for the Brussels, Washington, London, Canberra,… to aggregate more power over energy production and usage, which is the whole point of AGW alarmism.
I think this might be related enough to the thread.
The following is based on Figure 10 of “Atmospheric Moisture Transports from Ocean to Land and Global Energy Flows in Reanalyses” Trenberth et. al. 2011 and in particular the 333 W/m^2 GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
341 W/m^2 arrive at ToA.
102 W/m^2 are promptly reflected by the albedo which includes clouds, ice, ocean, vegetation and the ground and do not participate in the 333 W/m^2 GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
239 W/m^2 pass on beyond the albedo.
78 W/m^2 are absorbed by the atmosphere, i.e. clouds, water vapor, etc. and do not participate in the 333 W/m^2 GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
161 W/m^2 pass on past the atmosphere to strike the surface.
0.9 W/m^2 are absorbed by the surface and do not participate in the 333 W/m^ GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
160 W/m^2 are partitioned thus.
17 W/m^2 leave the surface as thermal convection and do not participate in the 333 W/m^ GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
80 W/m^2 leave the surface as evapotranspiration and do not participate in the 333 W/m^ GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
63 W/m^2 leave the surface of the earth as radiation.
40 W/m^2 travel through the atmospheric window and do not participate in the 333 W/m^ GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
23 W/m^2 travel past GHG/GHE level and do not participate in the 333 W/m^ GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
All of the energy (power flux) is accounted for without including the GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop. So what is the origin of the energy which feeds the 333 W/m^2 GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop? Not that it matters because simply erasing it makes absolutely no difference in the overall and ToA balance.
Relatively minor fluctuations in the albedo reflection and ocean absorption will raise or lower the atmospheric & surface temperatures per Q = U * A * dT without resorting to some magic unicorn’s GHG/GHE perpetual heat loop.
dogdaddyblog wrote on May 8, 2016 at 7:43 pm
Excellent graph, Bindidon! Thank you very much. I would have had to learn some new programs.
Looking at the data it is not apparent to me they start at 1998. From a visual standpoint, it would help if each of the trend lines began in 1998, as a common reference date (zeroed). Additionally, the slopes of the trends in degrees C per decade would be very meaningful to me as an old engineer. I do not, however, know if your program(s) have such capabilities.
Dave Fair
Sorry, I was quite busy at that time, and then comments were closed for the thread. Maybe you walk along here and discover the answer.
Firstly, what kind of ‘new programs’ do you mean? It’s just no more than this good ol’ Excel you may use on Google for free. Then, if you ask for a graph depicting the “post 1998” era, you get that! Here is what in fact you wanted, starting even in january 1997, with origin there:
http://fs5.directupload.net/images/160529/j4hwnkuv.jpg
or in scalable pdf format:
http://fs5.directupload.net/images/160529/qk9fdeln.pdf
Recall: this plot compares various pressure levels of the radiosonde temperature record “RATPAC B monthly combined” with the satellite records “UAH6.0 beta5 TLT”, “RSS4.0 TTT” and the surface record “GISSTEMP” (all normalised to UAH’s baseline 1981-2010).
And it tells us clearly that these 85 radiosondes measured something differing a lot from what the graph presented at essay begin tries to show:
– most pressure levels give anomalies higher than both RSS4.0 TTT and even GISSTEMP;
– UAH6.0 is below RATPAC’s 250 hPa level (it should be in fact near 700 hPa, a few miles lower).
The RATPAC B dataset has data from more radiosondes than Prof. Christy selected (59), and Christy’s selection moreover refers to data from radiosondes out of service (VIZ for example).
And the most interesting point in his testimony is that the picture showing a good fit of satellite with radiosonde data strangely ends in… 2004.
So Prof. Christy should feel free to publish his radiosonde data sources… and we can then compare these sources with publicly available data.