Essay by Eric Worrall
If climate models can’t even get heat spikes right, what use are they?
‘We should have better answers by now’: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating
Jonathan Watts Global environment editorThu 15 Aug 2024 22.00 AEST
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In a remarkably candid essay in the journal Nature this March, one of the world’s top climate scientists posited the alarming possibility that global heating may be moving beyond the ability of experts to predict what happens next.
“The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system,” wrote Gavin Schmidt, a British scientist and the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
If this anomaly does not stabilise by August, he said, it could imply “that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated”.
…With August now here, Schmidt is a fraction less disturbed. He said the situation remains unclear, but the broader global heating trends are starting to move back in the direction of forecasts. “What I am thinking now is we aren’t that far off from expectations. If we maintain this for the next couple of months then we can say what happened in late 2023 was more ‘blippish’ than systematic. But it is still too early to call it,” he said. “I am slightly less worried, but still humbled that we can’t explain it.”
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Looking back at the most extreme months of heat in the second half of 2023 and early 2024 when the previous records were beaten at times by more than 0.2C, an enormous anomaly, he said scientists were still baffled: “We don’t have a quantitative explanation for even half of it. That is pretty humbling.”
He added: “We should have better answers by now. Climate modelling as an enterprise is not set out to be super reactive. It is a slow, long process in which people around the world are volunteering their time. We haven’t got our act together on this question yet.”
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The recent El Ninõ added to global heat pressures. Scientists have also pointed to the fallout from the January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in Tonga, the ramping up of solar activity in the run-up to a predicted solar maximum, and pollution controls that reduced cooling sulphur dioxide particles. But Schmidt said none of these possible causes was sufficient to account for the spike in temperatures.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/15/we-should-have-better-answers-by-now-climate-scientists-baffled-by-unexpected-pace-of-heating
Despite Schmidt’s skepticism, I don’t believe the Hunga Tonga eruption should be dismissed as a candidate explanation for this year’s temperature bump. It seems logical to infer that the temperature spike which followed the volcano which filled the stratosphere with an enormous spike of powerful greenhouse gas was possibly caused by the volcano.
The fact nobody knows whether or how much Hunga Tonga contributed to this year’s temperature bump, and climate scientists like Schmidt admit there are no other good explanations, is an unusually candid glimpse into how incomplete our understanding of the climate system is.
If climate models cannot capture significant temperature excursion events, how can we rely on them to get anything right? Current climate models are clearly unfit for the purpose of advising government policy.
One silver lining to this scientific embarrassment, the 1.5C disaster narrative has been thoroughly debunked. But the 2C global warming limit is still the real deal, right? /sarc
Tonga. Not just water, but also significant thermal energy.
The climate models are not broken
They were never models at all
They are just wild guesses about the future global average temperature using a simple theory: Manmade CO2 is a satanic gas
The complexity of climate change is simplifies for the purpose of leftist propaganda:
Manmade CO2 is evil
Therefore, we will control manmade CO2 emissions
And that means we will control you
Perfect propaganda to implement leftist fascism.
The imaginary climate models, which I have called climate confuser games since 1997, do exactly what they are intended to do: Create fear.
Unfortunately. the average prediction of the 1970s climate models, of +3 degrees C. per CO2 x 2, is in the ballpark of the actual surface warming rate since 1975, or +2.4 degrees C. per CO2 x 2.
That is just a lucky guess based on an average of guesses, but most people do not know that. Nor do they know all the warming was not 100% from manmade CO2.
That’s why it is a lost cause to claim the models are completely worthless.
But we can correctly claim the actual post-1975 warming was pleasant, not the crisis that was predicted each year for the past 48 years
“Nor do they know all the warming was not 100% from manmade CO2.”
We do know that in the UAH data, since 1979, there is no evidence of any warming at all from any human cause…
… let alone CO2, of which human emissions are some 4% of the total CO2 flux..
Anomalies are not temperatures.
In Salt Lake City, known for very dry summers, there has already been more than double the “normal” August rainfall, only halfway through the month.
But weather “averages” can be deceptive–temperature averages that try to smooth out heat waves and cold snaps, precipitation averages that smooth out floods and sunny, rainless days–do averages really mean anything?
Nope, averages tell you nothing. Averages represent a *loss* of valuable data. Far too many statisticians, especially those in climate science, lose sight of what statistical analysis is actually telling them. An average of a distribution like a Gaussian one is the most likely value to be encountered but it is not the *only* value that can happen. The probability of the averaging happening is related to the variance of the entire set of values, the wider the variance the more the probability of the average begins to look like the probability of the values surrounding it. I.e. the hump around the average gets wider and less peaked.
Does climate science ever look at the variance of its temp data? As far as I can determine – NEVER.
When combining temps from the northern hemisphere with the southern hemisphere you are combining temps that have a wide variance – from high summer to low winter. These variances carry over into the anomalies as well. Yet climate science never makes an attempt to weight their data so they are comparing like for like. They don’t even weight daytime temps which have a broad distribution around Tmax temps versus highly peaked Tmin temps when forming their so-called “average” daily temp (which is really a mid-range value and not an average).
I’ve never seen a climate science paper that even talks about kurtosis or skewness in the temp data let alone the median and mode – another set of statistical descriptors that are absolutely required to understand a distribution.
If this “warm bump” is actually significant then the relevance of climate models is based on whether or not said warm bump is the start of a regime change or merely passing weather. If the later, general circulation models should not be expected to explain it.
Isn’t temperature a measurement of thermal energy? If so, for a real understanding of the actual thermal energy in the atmosphere shouldn’t the temperature be measured in degrees Kelvin?
A temperature of 45C translates to ~318K and a 2 degree rise takes the temperature to ~320K. That doesn’t look to me like a significant change in the atmosphere’s thermal energy.
If we consider the rise in global temperature/thermal energy as a percentage the result is that we are dealing with variations of temperature that are well less than 1% and if global temperature was plotted on the kelvin scale this rise would amount to little more than noise.
-Gavin
This is the closest I’ve seen to an acknowledgement the models dont (and cant) actually project climate and are, in fact, projecting from nothing more than a fit.
1°C is not much warming.
In the American heartland, 1°C is about the temperature change you get from a sixty mile latitude change, or a 500 foot elevation change.
Farmers can fully compensate for 1°C of warming by advancing Spring planting dates by about six days.
1°C is less than the hysteresis (“dead band” or “dead zone”) in a typical home thermostat, which means that your “climate controlled” indoor temperatures fluctuate by that much all day long, probably without you even noticing.
When I point that out, sometimes climate alarmists counter that small temperature changes matter a lot, because it takes only a small global average temperature change, perhaps as little as 5°C, to shift the world between interglacials and glacial maximums.
At first glance, that sounds persuasive, doesn’t it?
But it’s wrong. The problem with that argument is that it confuses cause and effect.
For the most part, it’s not the global average temperature change which causes glaciations and deglaciations. It’s the other way around. It’s the glaciations and deglaciations which cause the global average temperature change.
It seems that doubling the percentage of the planet covered by ice sheets lowers the planet’s average temperature. Who knew?
Except on or near the ice sheets, themselves, the temperature differences between glacial maximums and interglacial climate optimums are modest. The main thing which makes glaciations impactful is the ice, not the global average temperature difference.
For the most part, the ice sheets don’t grow because the Earth is slightly cooler, or shrink because the Earth is slightly warmer. The ice sheets grow when seasonality is reduced, and shrink when seasonality is increased. That is, the ice sheets advance when winters are mild and summers are cool, and the ice sheets retreat when winters are cold and summers are hot.
That’s how Milankovitch cycles drive glaciation cycles. Milankovitch cycles don’t change the amount of solar energy that the Earth receives. Instead, they change the breadth of seasonal temperature swings at the latitudes where it matters for glaciation: mainly northern North America and northern Eurasia.
When seasonal temperature swings increase, it increases ice melt in the summers and decreases snowfall in the winters. (When temperatures are very low snowfall is reduced, because the cold air cannot carry much moisture; it is said, not quite accurately, to be too cold to snow.”) That causes ice sheets to shrink.
When the seasonal swings are reduced, it decreases ice melt in the summers and increases snowfall in the winters. That causes ice sheets to grow.
When you get a few thousand years of slight ice sheet growth or retreat, it adds up to a big change in the amount of ice.
Note that it is not total solar insolation, or insolation at a particular latitude (e.g., 65°N), which drives glaciation cycles. It is the seasonal distribution of that insolation: large seasonal swings cause the ice sheets to shrink, and small seasonal swings cause the ice sheets to grow.
Summer temperatures probably matter more than winter temperatures, w/r/t ice sheet advance & retreat, so it is reasonable to hope that warming from elevated CO2 levels might forestall the next glaciation. But the causation mostly runs the other way: glaciations cause cold temperatures rather than vice-versa, and deglaciations cause warm temperatures rather than vice-versa.
So the modest global average temperature variation over glaciation cycles is not evidence that small temperature changes can have large impacts.
Pardon me if I don’t panic over the climate industry’s marketing FUD.