climate models

From The Australian August 18:

THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate. ...

Kurt Lambeck, immediate past president of the academy and a professor at the Australian National University's research school of earth sciences, initiated work on the document to clear up common misconceptions. ...

He said the fundamental principles of climatology, such as the role of carbon dioxide in global warming, were beyond dispute. But scientists were still arguing about the complex Earth systems feedback mechanisms, such as the possible cooling effect of clouds.

"If temperatures go up, there is going to be more evaporation, and that will produce more clouds," Professor Lambeck said. "That could produce a negative feedback, but to quantify that is a very difficult thing.

"How do we put that cloud cover into the models? That's where uncertainty comes in, but that's not going to change the basic outcomes."

Really?

A change of just 1% in cloud cover would account for all of twentieth century warming (Plimer's Heaven and Earth p 112). (And that's the claimed warming, including the uncheckable 'adjustments' made by people who have now lost the raw data - but that's another question.)

Jeremy Grantham has put out a report claiming to be "everything you need to know about global warming in five minutes". Thank you Jeremy for summarising the global warming case so succinctly. It should make it much easier for readers to see where the truth lies. Here are my comments on your case, please feel free to post any response you wish.

1) The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, after at least several hundred thousand years of remaining within a constant range, started to rise with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It has increased by almost 40% and is rising each year. This is certain and straightforward.

True. It is also a fact, proved by literally hundreds of careful scientific experiments, and also by every operator of a commercial greenhouse, that almost every plant on Earth grows better—30% better for a 300ppm increase is a conservative average—with more CO2. There are six billion people on Earth, and the increase in CO2 you mention has fed about a billion of them with the same cropland under cultivation. I think you had something else in mind when you mentioned the CO2 increase, but it had better be really important if  you intend us to put it ahead of the lives of billions.

In a previous post on peacelegacy.org,I used the example of a chappie called Fred to show you why the absence of an atmospheric hotspot is, all by itself, a complete disproof of the hypothesis of dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW). For those who came in late, the entire basis for the AGW claim is that certain unverified, and now falsified, computer models predict a lot of warming over the coming 100 years. It is shocking, but true, that there is no actual evidence whatsoever for this idea; it is computer models alone, and those models are basically no more than coded guesswork. And what do these models predict?

They predict that the world is heated by the appearance of a 'hotspot' in the atmosphere above the equator.

Model predicts air above the tropics heats up. from the NIPCC Report p. 107
But the reality is that this hotspot has failed to develop:

There's a story on wattsupwiththat about the UK MET office's hot new computer. The headline of the story is:

Met Office supercomputer: A megawatt, here, a megawatt there, and pretty soon we’re talking real carbon pollution

Of course Anthony Watts is saying that tongue in cheek, because carbon dioxide is plant food, not pollution. So the truth is the MET office has one of the GREENEST buildings in the UK. CO2 is nutrient. We should be glad of that small bounty as they go about proving the uselessness of their forecasts.

Here's the facts about numerical modelling: chaos principles guarantee that within a relatively short time the results are nonsense. No amount of speed or computer memory can change that. It's a mathematical fact. Three weeks out is probably the best possible, no matter what computing resources you throw at it.

This is a reasonably short work, very different from Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth. Although Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and erstwhile Chief Research Scientist with Australia's CSIRO, he has put together an accessible summary of some of the damning evidence against the global warming alarmism.

When I started looking into the claims of dangerous warming due to carbon dioxide, I was completely baffled, buried in details of climate models, puzzled by energy balance diagrams, and so forth. Was there a "greenhouse" blanketing the Earth, slowly frazzling us to death? The truth could have been anything. If you've followed this path too, you'll know what I mean. But one thing, one single piece of the jigsaw, cut through all the fog and answered the question. I want to show you the thing that absolutely clinched the global warming question for me. I have postgraduate training in physics, which helped, but the basic point is understandable by anyone, and in this article I want to explain what seems to me the key, conclusive fact in everyday terms.

Over on the newsgroups, folk are discussing a rather sad article from ScienceDaily, called "Apparent Problem With Global Warming Climate Models Resolved".

Apparently the folk at ScienceDaily, as well as a large fraction of the general public, need some basic lessons in how real science, the science that increases our understanding and helps us make sense of the world, works. Here's a textbook example of how not to do it: