Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Even worse than we thought ™. Despite a recent sanity test study which demonstrated that high end climate models hindcast impossible Eocene temperatures, climate scientists are pushing ahead anyway with their new, even more extreme climate projections.
Climate worst-case scenarios may not go far enough, cloud data shows
Modelling suggests climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than thought
Jonathan Watts @jonathanwatts
Sat 13 Jun 2020 16.00 AEST…
Modelling results from more than 20 institutions are being compiled for the sixth assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is due to be released next year.
Compared with the last assessment in 2014, 25% of them show a sharp upward shift from 3C to 5C in climate sensitivity – the amount of warming projected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. This has shocked many veteran observers, because assumptions about climate sensitivity have been relatively unchanged since the 1980s.
“That is a very deep concern,” Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. “Climate sensitivity is the holy grail of climate science. It is the prime indicator of climate risk. For 40 years, it has been around 3C. Now, we are suddenly starting to see big climate models on the best supercomputers showing things could be worse than we thought.”Advertisement
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Timothy Palmer, a professor in climate physics at Oxford University and a member of the Met Office’s advisory board, said the high figure initially made scientists nervous. “It was way outside previous estimates. People asked whether there was a bug in the code,” he said. “But it boiled down to relatively small changes in the way clouds are represented in the models.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/13/climate-worst-case-scenarios-clouds-scientists-global-heating
A month ago WUWT reported a study which demonstrated the new high end climate sensitivity projections (specifically CESM2) are incompatible with the fossil record.
CESM2, one of the new models, hindcasts tropical temperatures in excess of 55C during the early Eocene, temperatures which would have made photosynthesis impossible, creating lifeless tropical deserts.
The fossil record says different; the early Eocene was a period of abundant tropical life.
“Some of the newest models used to make future predictions may be too sensitive to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus predict too much warming,” said U-M’s Chris Poulsen, a professor in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and one of the study’s three authors. – source Science Daily
Poulsen’s team are not climate skeptics. They suggested CESM1.2, the predecessor of CESM2, did a “remarkably good job” of simulating early Eocene temperatures. CESM1.2 has an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 4.2C (7.6F), vs 5.2C (9.3F) for CESM2.
With 47 odd variables related to climate, with each one influencing the others dependent on how they interact with the interactions of others, you would need some pretty mighty computing power to make accurate predictions. Small errors in weightings of any of the variables as well as errors in the interactions with interactions will give inaccuracies that will compound through the chain. Where is the science that determines the weightings and interaction effects? is it just gobbledygook science? Thus far, making the models retroactive have all failed to be valid.
Yes, a CHIMP would likely do better. One thing many should be suspicious about is why is why CO2 has such high weighting.
It is time to call the hysteria over the modelling out for what it is-pseudoscience.
HT< "will give inaccuracies that will compound through the chain”
I have yet to encounter a climate modeler who understands the first thing about the growth of uncertainty from propagated error. And that’s now well over two dozen of them, including some of the most prominent.
Climate modelers seem to be incompetent as a class.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. They can’t even find the “divide by” and “2” key on a cheap pocket calculator.
“A bug in the code?” The code is the bug.
Good, classic science worked out long ago that you calculated the errors in your measurements and the numerical uncertainty of your deductions. A few numbers then summarise the excess words now used as explanations of inconvenient and wrong results.
Pat Frank used classic error analysis and met hostility when he should have been thanked.
If bloggers here seek improvements to these model uncertainties, simply mount a campaign seeking proper error analysis and better uncertainty analysis than the current (unscientific) pooling of expert opinion.
Geoff S
Thanks, Geoff. You’re right, my paper is just a straight-forward error analysis, common across the laboratory sciences.
When I wrote it, I thought the paper would be immediately accepted, because the analysis is so standard. Boy, was I wrong. 🙂
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
–Upton Sinclair, 1934
it baffles me no end that so many presumably trained and educated people have completely sold their souls for a pack of lies that purports to destroy our society.
What is clear is that there is no science in climate xcience and discussing it is as pointless as arguing the merits of unicorns.
They don’t believe the changes they advocate will destroy society. Quite the opposite in many cases; some I speak to bring up the parable of the garden, they compare capitalism (an untidy weed patch) with socialism (an orderly garden maximising production). They don’t like it when I point out the “weeds” in their allegory represent ordinary people exercising their freedom.
I met a guy who was probably left leaning ‘But shouldn’t things be run by people with expert knowledge?’
‘And suppose they are also corrupt, how do you get rid of them?’
That’s lesson No. 1
Lesson No 2. is about large control systems like Big Government.
The EU has still not come up with a policy on immigration or COVID19. But individual countries have and individuals did before governments made it law.
How long did it take the US government to deal with 911 or Katrina compared to people who were there?
Big Government is slow government and usually ham fisted one-size-fits-all government.
How do you tell who the experts are? One way is to give people who are on the receiving end of their “expertise” a regular opportunity to judge their performance, but for some reason people who advocate technocracy never seem that interested in this kind of feedback system.
Don’t these people have any knowledge of history at all? Or do these just fall back on the old, when it failed in the past they weren’t doing it right.
How will the CO2 concentration double by whatever year they are using? The population of the earth will level off in the second half of this century, and then may go down, especially if China cannot increase its fertility from the current 1.7 to the needed 2.2. They have about 1.45 billion population today, and if the fertility rate stays at 1.7, they will lose about 750 million by 2100. If it goes up to 2.2 (where it hasn’t been for decades) they will only lose about 250 million. India is just above that fertility level and it is dropping. Population is already decreasing in Japan, Portugal, Russia, … .The U.S. fertility is well below 2.1 and the country will start losing population even by ~2060 or so. Even Indonesia is at 2.4 fertility and dropping.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?end=2018&most_recent_value_desc=false&start=1960&view=chart
If CO2 is the problem, then tell them to get their noses and mouths sewn shut. They produce far too much of it to not have an effect.
On the other hand, whoever has been messing about with the weather gods has my AO so off-the-wall ridiculous that I”m interested in who it was turned off the June heat switch? Low last night was just barely 50F, and today, the high was 54F. I’ve had the furnace running since last Wednesday, for no reason other than I’m freakin’ cold and tired of it.
I do not believe these prognosticators could make an accurate forecast of where they’d find their own shoes in the morning. I have NEVER EVER had to run the furnace this late in the year, or put the extra blankets back on the bed, just to stay warm at night. The forecast yesterday on the NWS site was 88F high for coming Wednesday. Now it’s dropped to 84F, and looks like it might just drop again in another 48 hours.
This is ridiculous. I hope all of this comes back to embarrass them publicly as soon as possible. I would love to find snow on my front steps in August, far ahead of fall snow possibilities. When it happens, I’ll get photos of it.
I’m 8 miles south of the Wisconsin state line and 6 miles west of Lake Michigan, and I believe these “science guys” are either incompetent or greed-ridden frauds. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. They’ll have to prove otherwise.
Sara:
There were two VEI4 volcanic eruptions in June of 2019, and it generally takes about a year for the maximum cooling effect from a volcanoes SO2 aerosol emissions to be reached, and 18-24 months for recovery back to pre-eruption levels, as they settle out.
So, these cooler temperatures are right on schedule.
It remains to be seen whether the COVID-19 shutdowns might shorten the recovery time to warmer temperatures.
We hadn’t a winter in Germany so your arguments are a bit localized. Why were the volcanoes ineffective here?
No Icelandic volcanic eruptions? 🙂
Ranier Bensch:
Erratic Jet Stream.
Their effect shows up in the average anomalous global temperatures, and changes in ENSO temperatures. (now trending toward a La Nina).
At VEI6, Pinatubo was 100 times larger than a VEI4. The difference even it made to global temperature can barely be distinguished from the background noise.
https://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1978
VEI4s aren’t going to make the slightest difference to the local temperature.
Loydo:
“VEI4s aren’t going to make the slightest difference to the local temperature”
Pinatubo lowered average anomalous global temperatures by 4.5-5.0 deg. C.
There are 40 reported La Ninas for the period 1850-2016. Thirty of them were caused by VEI4 or VEI4? eruptions. La Ninas normally cause a reduction in average global temperatures, often felt locally, depending upon how the air circulates.
I have examined the Central England Instrumental Temperatures Data Set for the years 1660 – 1875, and there at least 30 La Ninas from VEI3-VEI4-VEI4? eruptions mirrored in their LOCAL temperatures (assuming that the VEI assignments from “Volcanoes of the World” is correct.
“Pinatubo lowered average anomalous global temperatures by 4.5-5.0 deg. C.”
You made this up.
The volcanoes may have an effect, but it is tenuous in regard to my area. I think that would have a more localized effect. I’m too far north for it to have input up here. It would take an explosion the size of Tambora’s big burp for a volcano to have much influence up here. Even the eruptioni of Ejafjallajukl in Iceland didn’t do a whole lot, other than reroute airplane traffic, and while Pinatubo did produce a 1F degree drop when it erupted, it was very temporary. Mt. St. Helens didn’t have much effect, either, but it was annoying.
The chilly weather is the really result of that ineffective Caribbean hurricane Bert or Cris or whatever it was named, which started in May in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and went straight up the Mississippi valley, disturbing local weather with excessive rain and petering out to a heavy-duty rainstorm by the time it got up here. Unfortunately, the spin wasn’t gone, so it pulled cold air down from the north, and by the time it really wimped out somewhere near Hudson’s Bay in Canada, there was snow in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Minnesota, and in my area, just plain old cold weather. Awfully low humidity, too, but we did have rain while Herbert/Whatsitsname wandered around up here.
Usually what happens with hurricanes/tropical storms in the Midwest is lots of rain, wind, some tornadoes, some flooding, rivers over their banks, people driving into puddles under bridges and having to wade out, etc. but not cold weather like this. But volcanoes having an effect here? Only if they are as explosive as Tambora of Pinatubo. And Tambora erupted early in the Dalton Minimum, already underway, which exacerbated the effect of the solar minimum.
Now if a whole bunch of volcanoes erupted- an entire range of them down in Chile in the middle of ski season, fore example – that and their outgassing might have an effect on global weather for a few years.
If there are more eruptions, we could face a real agrarian disaster everywhere. Hmmm….. Ain’t sayin’ it can’t happen.
Unfortunately, the cold air from Canada is hard on everything, including bugs, which makes it hard for birds to find food for their offspring. I’m still putting out food for them. But if we have another episode like the Dalton Minimum, I should stock ahead on bird food for the birds and peanuts for the squirrels, right? 🙂 Don’t worry, I do pay attention to these things. Just tyring to plan ahead.
Sara:
As I had mentioned to Loydo, the Central England Instrumental Temperatures data set shows that every decrease in temperature was associated with an eruption somewhere in the world. The only time it warmed up was between eruptions. See:
https://www.Osf.io/b2vxp/
You are not as far north as Central England, but the volcanoes certainly affected them!
At 410 ppm the CO2 concentration is already about half-way to doubling the pre-industrial level and that has coincided with perhaps 0.8C GAT rise, but probably less than that.
Yet according to some of those sensitivity estimates the GAT is supposed to suddenly increase another 4C in the next 60 – 70 years or go virtually exponential later in the century and as mentioned above opposite to the theoretic logarithmic decay of effect.
Meaning, they’ve disqualified the “scientists” allegation.
There is another word that is correct, alarmists, should be used instead.
They will bray and the faithful will hear. Those with “ethical” attachments will sing and prostrate themselves to earn their mortal gods and goddesses’s favor. This is the secular path since time immemorial.
“Despite a recent sanity test study which demonstrated that high end climate models hindcast impossible Eocene temperatures
The missing black… brown matter.
Agree with Pat Frank on this being solid proof of a non scientific process being used.
Models that have been too warm are getting tweaked to make them warmer yet?
Science would compel the scientist to adjust the models so that they are a closer fit to the observations……………..cooler. Instead, they adjusted the equations to make the models even warmer(and more wrong)…………because the previous model projections did not scare people enough in order to accomplish the political objectives.
During the past 4 decades, they have been consistently wrong on almost everything.
We are having a climate OPTIMUM for life by all objective standards in authentic science. The last 40 years have featured the best weather/climate for life on this greening planet in at least 1,000 years(the last time that it was this warm, during the Medieval Warm Period).
If you want to imagine a real climate crisis, think about global cooling. Or, how about just going back to the OLD climate from around a century ago. 1 Deg. cooler and 120 PPM less atmospheric CO2.
This would result in world food production dropping by around 25%. As a result, roughly 1 billion people would starve to death within 3 years and food/crop prices would triple as we rationed the severe shortage in supplies.
They keep telling us that this will happen:
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
June 29, 1989
https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
“Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees. Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.”
“Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands”
They have been wrong every year. Instead this keeps happening:
“Global cereal production, utilization, stocks and trade all set to rise to new records in 2020/21”
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/
Soybeans: Yield by Year, US
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld.php
Corn yields
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html
This is the only field of science that I know of……….actually, any field at all, where predictions failing every year are handsomely rewarded with more money and resources. Climate scientists and modelers have zero accountability.
I can see from the 40 models whose ECS assessment is now available give 25 different predictions of temperature rise from CO2 doubling. These predictions vary from 1.8 to 5.6 degrees Celsius. Given that according to all accepted accounts. preindustrial temperatures have risen by about 0.8 to 1 degree Celsius at the present time and that CO2 levels have not yet doubled from the preindustrial levels of approximately 270ppm, one must doubt the validity of all of them. In fact these models are “NOT EVEN WRONG” (to use the words of Peter Woit concerning String Theory). They are all misleading as even the smallest ECS of 1.8 degrees Celsius suggests that the world temperature would have risen by 1.3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times. We do not even need to hindcast temperatures into the Eocene to reach this conclusion.
Just like the Greenhouse Effect, Climate Sensitivity is a fiction arising from irrelevant mathematical processes. The facts are to be seen in actual real-world measurements not in computer games.
The latest weekly atmospheric CO2 concentration figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show a remarkably clear correlation between the annual rate of change of CO2 concentration and the El Niño events. That is, climate change causes CO2 change not the reverse as promulgated by the UN IPCC. Now I presume they will try and tell us that CO2 causes the El Niño events.
For the 3 year period 29 March, 1958 to 1961, the rate of increase in CO2 concentration was 0.55 ppm pa. For the 3 year period May 2017 to 2020, the rate had steadily increased to 2.91 ppm pa, more than five times greater than 60 years earlier. The acceleration in the rate of generation of CO2 over the time of the measurements is attributed to an increase in biogenic CO2 in response to the gradual increase in temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age. Justification for this claim can be seen in a comparison between the dearth of life at the cold Poles and the profusion of life, in a myriad of forms, in the warm Equatorial zone. Life forms flourish with greater temperature thereby raising the rate of exchange of CO2 via the associated life and death processes.
There has not been any commensurate change in satellite (UAH) lower troposphere temperature from the Tropics zone.
The Greenhouse Effect was invented by ignoring the gravity induced pressure-temperature gradient in the atmosphere. When are we going to be rid of the lies from the UN IPCC ?
It seems it’s time for the data fiddlers to adjust the temperature records again to fit the new models. That’s how it works isn’t it?
To me the JOKER in the pack with all of this is the simple fact which gets ignored in the models, namely that at the phase change of water the sensitivity coefficient (S) in the Planck Equation dF = S *dT is equal to Zero; as it occurs at constant temperature.
This phase change is continuously taking place in the clouds and has a marked influence on the overall climate sensitivity value.
The mere fact that it is not included in the models explains a great deal.
Clouds can only be explained by consideration of the thermodynamics of the Hydro Cycle which operates as a Rankine Cycle, where large energies are moved up through the atmosphere and beyond irrespective of, but in conjunction with, radiation matters.
This bleat that we do not really understand how the clouds work is just intellectual laziness. A great deal is known about the workings of the Rankine Cycle. We use it daily in our steam generating plants.
3C, 5C warmer than what? What was the bloody temperature when the level of CO2 was 280 parts per million?
I’ve been keeping track of weather in my area for several years, because sometimes, we get some real doozies in the way of storms and water volume when they end.
When I moved out here from Chicago, snow fell in the winter, occasionally very late in the Autumn around “freeze time”, and sometimes late into March. That was not all that unusual, and the geese would return to their living quarters from the South sometime between mid-February, when the rivers and small lakes were still frozen, and mid-March. They don’t ALL go up to Canada, you know. They return to where they were hatched.
But lately, they may come back on time only to find that everything everywhere is a waterlogged mess, and nesting on a riverside may mean that their entire family can be swept away by a rise of a mere two inches in the water volume of a river, with no notice at all.
That’s how much precipitation we’ve gotten, and it is increasing. The local big river is nearly over its banks on Monday, and less than two weeks later, it’s nearly dry. That means something is going on with the weather, NOT the climate, and it affects not only the water birds, but the Silly Hoomans who build homes on those rivers. And they wonder why they get flooded. Even Silly Geese have better sense than to build a nest where they know it will flood.
This isn’t climate stuff, this is weather. All these grant-grabbing desk wankers are milking grant money for everything they can get. Their prognostications are inevitably wrong, but they don’t have to return that grant money because by the time their predictions are supposed to come about, they’ll be gone with the wind.
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
My impression, no model will tell us about increasing ice in Greenland the last days
😀
PS
In addition:
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
If you are a climate research scientist seeking funding , this new revelation, that clouds play a part in weather and ultimately climate. You have to be philosophical, just remember, every cloud has a silver lining…
Meanwhile, the Greenland SMB is being stubborn and not wanting to turn south. Clouds over Greenland are still dumping snow.
http://polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/surface/SMB_curves_LA_EN_20200613.png
You are 3 h belated 😀
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/13/climate-scientists-step-up-the-climate-emergency-narrative/#comment-3014950
😀
Great minds think alike 😉
“Modelling suggests climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than thought”
Modelling can suggest anything the programmers want it to suggest. If the climate is “considerably” more sensitive to carbon emissions than previously thought, then why haven’t any of the previous dire predictions come to pass? The Arctic should have become ice free long before now. And all the floods, droughts, hurricanes, and other disasters should have become catastrophic by now. If anything, the lack of a noticeable increase in extreme weather demonstrates that the climate is less sensitive to emissions than thought.
Are government grants to climate scientists slowing down? That could be the real reason why climate scientists are desperate to alarm the public. Follow the money.
The latest weekly Mauna Loa Observatory weekly CO2 data through to 30 May shows :-
Empirical data show that the carbon emissions are far more sensitive to temperature than one would think.
Discrete Fourier Transform of the annual rate of change of CO2 concentration derived from the weekly concentration data show peaks for wavelengths of 27.2 days and 29.4 days which must represent the draconic and synodic periods of the Moon due to the Moon passing through a node of the intersection of the Earth and Moon ellipses – draconic period, and the Moon passing between the Sun and the Earth – synodic period. Other than during an eclipse I have not read of observers being aware of these, what must be, small temperature changes. However they and their multiples are plain to see in the DFT amplitude spectrum.
Climate change causes CO2 change Not the reverse as claimed by the corrupt UN IPCC.
Loyodo:
You made this up.
Yes, I inadvertently did.
The correct amount is 0.45-0.55 deg. C.
“That is a very deep concern,” Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. … “ Now, we are suddenly starting to see big climate models on the best supercomputers showing things could be worse than we thought.”
It’s unsurprising that the director of an institute whose existence REQUIRES ongoing warming to be man’s fault (for continuance of funding) would say this. This, er, Swedish gentleman is, according to Wiki, no scientist. He has, um, “published over 100 papers in fields ranging from practical land and water use to global sustainability”.
Johan, the science is laughably simple. Here it is, in 500 words and a single graph …
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341622566
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338914556
I suggest you get a new job; an honest one.